Odette Gregory reviews an exhibition of works by Julian Schnabel at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, CT, on view through March 2014. Gregory writes: "Wax paintings, plate paintings, works on paper, sculpture and works on novel materials like Kabuki screens are held together through conversation the pieces have with each other, rather than
Brendan Carroll exhorts contemporary painters to embrace more patience in the studio. Carroll writes: "Productivity, redundancy, and professional practices can be confused with smart and successful art. But it’s more than okay to be patient. Patience can be necessary for a piece to be worked to its natural completion... In the studio, a painter might
Betsy Huete reviews the exhibition Wols: Retrospective at the Menil Collection, Houston, on view through January 12, 2014. Huete writes that it "becomes clear within moments that Wols, while being influenced by the people of his time like the Surrealists and Paul Klee, was clearly looking introspectively, producing innovative works that seemed to be speaking
Maria Calandra visits the studio of painter Maya Hayuk. Hayuk's mural works will be on view at Wynwood Walls, Art Basel 2013. Calandra writes: "While I was in [Hayuk's] studio she was working on four separate paintings on panel which where similar to her murals except for their size. With each painting in a different
An excerpt from "Inner Seeing," Erich Franz's text for the exhibition Helmut Federle: The Ferner Paintings at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, on view through January 11, 2014. Franz writes: "If one intended to classify in words that which is visible, just a few would suffice, and they would be the same for every painting:
Lita Barrie writes about the paintings of Lisa Adams whose works are on view at Miami Project, CB1 Gallery, booth #215, December 3-8, 2013. Barrie notes that "Adams’ recent melancholic paintings, do not represent melancholy in obvious themes and iconography they exhale it through enigmas - created by combining different emotions and different painting styles
Larry Groff interviews painter Diana Horowitz about her work. Horowitz remarks: "I tend to be an intuitive person and painter. I often find that careful measuring takes me away from my natural way of seeing so I tend to avoid doing too much of it... I usually don’t invent things or move things, but I
Rob Marks reviews the exhibition Anoka Faruqee: Substance and Accident at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, on view through December 7, 2013. Marks notes that "the perception that Faruqee’s patterns are self-evident—arise only because the conventional idea of moiré-ness, like an insidious stereotype, may distract viewers from the particular conditions that characterize Faruqee’s expression of the
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Andy Parkinson about his work. Parkinson comments: "The grid is nearly always my starting point because that seems the most rational way of dividing the surface to create a pattern that relates to the dimensions of the support. I think in terms of pattern and surface as opposed to ‘picture’. If
Considering works by Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Dan Colen, Botticelli and others, Martin Mugar examines the differences between materiality and transcendence in painting. Mugar writes that works such as Richter's abstract paintings "risk and do at times descend into pure materiality. This embrace of the material results in what I would call art that is
Victoria Webb interviews painter Jim Byrne about his work on the occasion of his recent exhibition at Tew Galleries, Atlanta. Byrne remarks: "At the start of a painting I am often thinking of a kind of gesture or relationship between people or between a person and an object or a space that resonates with some
Jed Perl reviews the exhibition Balthus: Cats and Girls - Paintings and Provocations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through January 12, 2014. Perl writes: "Balthus’s fascination with the life around him had nothing to do with documenting everyday experiences and everything to do with uncovering the hidden meanings of those
Piri Halasz reviews three current painting exhibitions in New York: Surrealism and the rue Blomet at Eykyn MacLean (through December 13), Roy Lerner, Peter G. Ray: Wizards with Paint at Sideshow Gallery (through December 15), and Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale... and Friends at Freedman Art (through January 31, 2014). Writing about the Surrealism
Paul Behnke photo blogs several painting shows currently and recently on view in Chelsea including: Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (through December 21), Larry Poons: Geometry + Dots 1957 - 1965 at Loretta Howard Gallery (through December 14), Disposition: Gregory Hayes & Anne Russinof at Blank Space (through January 3, 2014), Sean
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of painter Matt Phillips. Asked about the interaction between the image and support edge, Phillips comments: "I like that the image itself is a form... as you start to make the painting, you're given the rectangle, but that it doesn't necessarily have to live withing that arbitrary
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Léger, Modern Art and the Metropolis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view through January 5, 2014. Naves writes: "World War One didn’t alter Léger’s take on the machine. If anything, it emboldened a sensibility already entranced by the machine’s regularity, precision, and power. Admittedly, a revived humanism did
John Bunker reviews the exhibition Hantaï, Hartung, Soulages and Tàpies at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, on view through January 18, 2014. Bunker writes: "...how did these four artists coming to prominence in Europe during the 50s develop ideas about abstraction on their own terms? That’s a complex question, but what comes to the fore in
Tim Keane reviews the exhibition Esteban Vicente: The Art of Interruption at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, on view through through January 12, 2014. Keane writes that the show "focuses on how Vicente translates modernist designs for painting into the diction of collage. Braque and Matisse loom as his chief influences. Like those two
David Pagel reviews the exhibition of paintings by Hayal Pozanti at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, on view through December 21, 2013. Pagel writes that Pozanti's paintings "resemble the impossible offspring of doodles and diagrammatic drawings of machine parts. The combination is felicitous. It links the no-nonsense functionalism of precisely designed prototypes to the whimsy
David Brody reviews the exhibition Matthew Blackwell: Picklelilly at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, on view through November 30, 2013. Brody writes: "As with James Ensor’s or Max Beckmann’s demented crowd scenes, Blackwell’s figures are both fantastic projections of psychic roles and notes on everyday weirdness. The sturdy hitchhiker in Here?, (2011) shoulders a tangled