Link posts — Page 12

John Yau reviews Peter Shear: Magnolias All at Once at the Fortnight Institute, New York, on view through July 16, 2017. Yau writes: "Shear is interested in composition, color relationships, how forms sit within the rectangle of the canvas, what can be done with the edges, and the texture of paint... There is something wonderfully

Michael Coffey reviews Beckett’s Thing–Painting and Theatre by David Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press) Coffey writes: "David Lloyd, in his long-awaited book on Samuel Beckett and the visual arts, arrives, in his closing chapter, at this electrifying thought: 'The political effect of Beckett’s work in general takes place not at the level of statement, but in

D. Creahan reviews Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings and Plant Drawings at Matthew Marks Gallery, o view through June 24, 2017. Crehan writes: "Alongside his body of paintings, Matthew Marks is also exhibiting a series of Kelly’s Plant Drawings, a long-running series of graphite and ink drawings made as observations of the natural curves and lines

Mario Naves reviews Mark Tobey: Threading Light at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, on view through September 10, 2017. Naves writes: "'Threading Light' is a superb exhibition. Sensitively paced and keenly selected, the exhibition underscores painterly and metaphorical continuities, all the while tracing a development that, though not without hiccups, is streamlined and, until the

Claire Messud reviews Matisse in the Studio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through July 9, 2017. Messud writes: "this glorious exhibition impresses the viewer also with simpler, more atavistic and abiding truths: Matisse’s passion for color, for light, for pattern, for flowers and the female figure; and his conviction—borne out in

Peter Malone reviews Mike Solomon: Immediate Splendor at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, on view through July 8, 2017. Malone begins: "Mike Solomon’s pictorial space appears familiarly limited in the traditional modernist sense, but is dominated by a persistent blur. Viewers are left with the odd feeling of being kept just outside of an event

Deanna Sirlin reviews Philip Guston and The Poets at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, on view through September 3, 2017. Sirlin concludes: "[Eugenio] Montale writes of his own poetry, 'The subject matter of my poetry . . . is the human condition considered in itself.' Whether one is looking at the earliest period of Guston’s pictorial

An essay by David Cohen on the paintings of Lois Dickson. Dickson's exhibition New Worlds is on view at the New York Studio School through July 15, 2017. Cohen writes: "A ludic morphology lies at the heart of Dickson’s endeavor. Elaborations of shape and excavations of depth animate her pictorial intelligence in ways that are

Matthew Collings reviews Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave at the British Museum, on view through August 13, 2017. Collings concludes: "​Hokusai believed every year of working improved his ability and he would have to get to 100 before he really hit the peak. At 75 he wrote modestly and with comic particularity that it was

James Kalm visits Markus Lüpertz: New Paintings at Michael Werner Gallery, New York, on view through July 7, 2016. Kalm notes that this exhibition "presents over two dozen paintings from the past two years featuring the painter’s engagement with the Neo-Classic tradition. With a glancing nod to artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Pierre Puvis de

John Goodrich reviews Janice Nowinski: Paintings at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: "In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly 'low,' unpolished approach with high ambitions for painting. The artist’s fairly conventional motifs — figures posed in landscapes and interiors

Zadie Smith profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher is on view at the New Museum, New York through September 3, 2017. Smith writes: "Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character

John Goodrich reviews Thaddeus Radell: Hard Rain at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: "Throughout these paintings, the candid attempts and re-attempts to define each subject become, in effect, stories of their own: encapsulated histories of a transcendental quest. Radell’s work, in short, revels in the epic

Thomas Micchelli reviews Merrill Wagner: Works from the 70’s at Zürcher Gallery, New York, on view through June 24, 2017. Micchelli writes: "Merrill Wagner’s remarkable tape paintings are as much head games as they are inquiries into precision and chance. Trying to puzzle them out is akin to reverse-engineering a ship in a bottle: even

Clarity Haynes and Kate Hawes interview painter Jenny Dubnau. Dubnau comments: "one of the most interesting aspects of portraiture is the idea ... if you're painting a particular person who lives at a particular time... you're painting their visage but you're really also painting the zeitgeist of the times which is inscribed upon their faces

Joe Lloyd reviews Lee Lozano: c 1962 at Hauser & Wirth, London, on view through July 29, 2017. Lloyd writes: "Each piece is untitled and diminutive in size. In shape, they range from squares to frieze-like panels... By forcing one to scrutinise closely, the form draws one into Lozano’s domain while distancing it from the

Mario Naves reviews Independent Visions: Helene Schjerfbeck and Her Contemporaries at Scandinavia House, New York, on view through October 3, 2017. Naves writes: "... an uncompromising, if at times highly affected, talent. At her best, Schjerfbeck holds vulnerability and measure in wiry equilibrium... The innovations of early Modernism liberated these painters [Schjerfbeck, Sigrid Schauman, Ellen

Henri Neuendorf interviews painter Markus Lüpertz, whose work is on view at Michael Werner Gallery, New York through July 7, 2017. Two concurrent retrospectives of Lüpertz's work are on view in Washington D.C.: Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History at the Hirshhorn Museum (through September 10) and Markus Lüpertz at the Phillips Collection (through September 3).

John Yau reviews Anne Harvey: Private Life at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through June 11, 2017. Yau writes: "Harvey’s observational paintings were described by John Ashbery, in 1966, as 'the probing anguish of an almost Jamesian dissecting eye.' Ashbery went on to state: “A curious anxiety, tempered by the exhilaration

Rebecca Brantley reviews ABSTRACTS at Poem 88, Atlanta, on view through June 10, 2017. The show features works by Brendan Carroll, Ben Steele and Zuzka Vaclavik. "Each artist," Brantley writes, "engages 20th-century traditions, albeit in markedly different ways."