Reviews
Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books
Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show “[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of ‘pure painting’—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is ‘parrot colored’—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in the heyday of […]
John Walker: At the Edge of Land and Water
artcritical
Wendy Gittler reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush recently on view at the New York Studio School. Gittler writes: “Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and […]
Byron Kim’s Painting Ritual
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Byron Kim: Sunday Paintings at James Cohan Gallery, New York, on view through February 17, 2018. Butler writes: “What makes [Kim’s paintings] unremarkable are their size and the undramatic skies they depict – not the complex, sublime sky paintings made by, say, great Dutch painters like Aelbert Cuyp and Jacob van Ruisdael. Instead, they are […]
Laura Owens: Art in Free Fall
New York Review of Books
David Salle writes about the work of Laura Owens on the occasion of a recent mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Salle writes: “Owens’s paintings are squarely in the middle of a postmodern aesthetic that’s been gaining momentum for the last ten or fifteen years. It […]
Cézanne Portraits: Relentless Intimacy
London Review of Books
T.J. Clark reviews Cézanne Portraits on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London (through February 11) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from March 25 – July 1, 2018. Clark writes: “Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve … is useless. It offers […]
Sensate Wisdom: Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough
Through the decades Desiderio’s “sensate wisdom,” the unique visualizing capabilities Alberti ascribed to painting, have persevered, balanced with a savvy contemporary approach to subject.
Pat Adams @ Victoria Munroe Fine Art
artcritical
Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Pat Adams: Then Found at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York, on view through January 27, 2018. Pundyk writes: “The works in Then Found span the years 1997 to 2016. This is only a third of the more than six decades Adams has spent building her extensive body of perceptual, non-figurative, mixed media work. […]
Christian Bonnefoi: Taking the Painter Out of Painting
Hyperallergic
Gwenaël Kerlidou writes about the work of Christian Bonnefoi. Kerlidou writes: “Bonnefoi’s strategies seem to condense a few aspects of the work of his American contemporaries: the objectification and theatricalization of a gesture devoid of pathos of David Reed; the deconstructing strategies of Jonathan Lasker — even if Lasker’s use of exaggeratedly thick brushstrokes seems […]
Watteau’s Eloquent Formalism
Painting Perceptions
John Goodrich visits Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection and shares his observations about Watteau’s striking formalism. Goodrich writes: “Superficially, Watteau is all fanciful froth – charming subject matter, feathery modeling, a light, darting touch. But what distinguishes Watteau are his extraordinary and comprehensive intuitions about formal rhythms — in this case, […]
Laura Owens: The Sky Is the Limit
ARTnews
Phyllis Tuchman reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Tuchman writes that Owen’s recent abstract works “are bold, handsome works that exemplify how a new wave of artists is approaching the making of abstract paintings. Instead of appropriating, say, […]
Laura Owens: Moving Targets
Art in America
Nancy Princenthal reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Princenthal writes: “What critics offer often in defense of abstract painting amounts to proclaiming its unique sincerity—the argument is that good painting is, perhaps singularly, unironic in its quest for transcendent […]
John Walker @ the New York Studio School
Arte Fuse
Jonathan Goodman reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush at the New York Studio School, on view through January 21, 2018. Goodman writes: “The directness of Walker’s abstractions, highly patterned in their composition and emotionally direct, claim our attention by virtue of their immediacy and their freedom from pretense. Walker seems to have internalized […]
Ryan Crotty @ High Noon Gallery
Hyperallergic
Stephen Maine reviews Ryan Crotty: Never the Less at High Noon Gallery, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Maine writes: “To the extent that Crotty’s work is about the fluid movement of color across the surface, it can be viewed in terms of Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler […]
Rose Wylie @ the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Studio International
Joe Lloyd reviews Rose Wylie: Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, on view through February 11, 2018. Lloyd writes: “There is another tension in Wylie’s work, between intentionality and spontaneity… Wylie’s work thrives on memory’s entropy, on the way we organise the floating odds and ends of our minds. Human, all too human, in […]
Sex Object Lesson: Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner
In Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings, dark humor and acrid color are mitigated by luminosity and sensitive execution.
Frances Barth @ Silas Van Morisse
artcritical
David Brody reviews Frances Barth: New Paintings, 2011-2017 at Silas Van Morisse Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through December 17, 2017. Brody begins: “Frances Barth’s new paintings combine calm planes of beautiful color with graphic details that suggest landscape, while also subverting easy spatial readings. As with Thomas Nozkowski’s cryptic modes of abstraction, Barth’s uncertain […]
A Road Trip and the American Landscape
If a gallery full of landscape paintings makes one yearn for the places they depict, day after day of driving through the country at 80 miles per hour makes one thankful for the efforts of painters who actually succeeded in locking down the essence of particular places.
Matisse-Bonnard @ the Staedal Museum
AbCrit
Richard Ward reviews Matisse-Bonnard: Long Live Painting at the Staedal Museum Frankfurt, on view through January 14, 2018. Ward notes that the “difference of approach [of the two artists] is visible throughout the exhibition and manifests itself in various ways: Matisse’s primary creation is pictorial space. Even a simple, almost sketch-like painting, such as the amazing ‘Open […]
Lauren Luloff: Drawing (with bleach) from life
Two Coats of Paint
Eileen Jeng Lynch reviews the recent exhibition Lauren Luloff: The Evergreens at Ceysson & Bénétière, New York. Lynch writes: “The title of the show, The Evergreens, derives its name from the eponymous nineteenth-century cemetery in the artist’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Luloff used bleach to paint flora – including sunflowers, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, and blue spruces – in […]
Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting
Aeqai
Karen S. Chambers reviews Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through Jan. 21, 2018. Chambers writes: “The National Gallery of Art … has assembled what may be the definitive exhibition of 17th-century Dutch high-life genre painting, which focuses on the daily […]