Tyler Green talks to curator Karen Butler about the exhibition Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 at the Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, on view through April 21, 2013. Asked about the prominence of still life in Braque's oeuvre, Butler comments that "for Braque [still life] was a particularly important genre. It was
Paul Behnke visits the studio of painter Tom Burckhardt. Behnke writes: "Burckhardt's work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, the Modern and the Conceptual.... [his] work often deals with traditional stereotypes of artists viewed through an individually conceptual filter. He describes his personality as a wedge between the motivating force of doubt (think de
Hayley Plack blogs about the exhibition Angels, Demons and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., on view through May 12, 2013. Plack writes that "The exhibition traces the relationships between Jackson Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jean Dubuffet, three artists working simultaneously across continents in similar abstract styles during the period of
Steven Alexander blogs about an exhibition of paintings by Mara Held at Gary Snyder Gallery, New York, on view through March 2, 2013. Alexander writes: "Held makes paintings that operate both as ecstatic images and as exquisite objects. Her images are built with curving concentric contours that intersect and interact to form complex undulating spaces...
Jeffrey Kirkwood reviews the recent exhibition Amanda Valdez: Taste of Us at Denny Gallery, New York. Kirkwood writes: "It is in [the] mutual dependence and opposition between the materials out of which the pieces are ‘built’ and the overdetermined shapes they create that the show really does its heavy lifting. Everything in the pictures suggests
Andy Parkinson reviews the exhibition At the Point of Gesture at the Lion and Lamb Gallery, on view through March 23, 2013. The exhibition features the work of five painters, Clem Crosby, Gabriel Hartley, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, David Ryan, and Alaena Turner, "each," Parkinson writes "in their different ways exploring the potential of gesture, materiality and
Mel Gooding talks to painter Andrew Bick on the occasion of the recent exhibition School studies: Ghosts, Arguments at Hales Gallery, London. Bick comments: " I think I’m actually interested in what I would call contradictory space, in the sense of something that becomes visually unfathomable, or is a conundrum, something that can’t quite be
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Susanna Heller. Heller comments: "It took me a good ten years to figure out how to engage the city, how to draw it, how to paint it, how to picture it… it wasn't exactly about its look, it's more about its being. If you think
Janet Purcell reviews an exhibition of paintings by Geoffrey Dorfman titled Eye and Mind at Rider University Art Gallery, Lawrenceville, NJ, on view through March 3, 2013. Purcell writes: "What you will first see as you step into the Rider art gallery is color. Then you’ll see energy... In Dorfman’s paintings you begin by noticing
Debra Barrera visits the studio of painter Jonathan Leach on the occasion of Leach's solo exhibition opening at Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, on February 28, 2013. Barrera writes: "In Leach’s newest painting, bands of color shift slightly from vermillion to soft fuchsia, with a new subtlety of composition. Sitting atop a small table in the
Cindy Stockton Moore visits the studio of painter Anne Schaefer. Schaefer comments: "Much of the new work mines the imagery, pattern and chance forms created in the studio. Basically, I’m using the material refuse from the creation of work as the source material (or building blocks) of new work. The large-scale work is dimensionally specific.
Sharon Butler blogs about the work of painter Julian Kreimer, whose exhibition Julian Kreimer: Coming and Going was recently on view at Weeknights Gallery, Brooklyn. Kreimer paints both from observation and non-objectively, the "accuracy of color placement and representation of light in the observational paintings inform the abstractions, allowing both to exist as windows into
Raphael Rubinstein encourages a re-evaluation of the work of painter Robert Colescott. Rubinstein describes Colescott as "a painter of incredible courage. He seems to leap into every painting as if it will be his last, determined to leave no inch of the canvas unactivated, no social taboo unchallenged, no occasion for painterly bravura unseized. His
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of artist Vincent Como. Como descirbes his interest in "the idea of this surface, this pristine plane that references monochrome painting, references this history ingrained in modern art, and then like a black hole, it's collapsing on itself… succumbing to the weight of its own history." He
Valerie Brennan interviews painter David Quinn about his work and process. Quinn explains: "For the past two years I have been working almost exclusively on panels which are 205 x 133mm. The starting point can be anything, a colour, a found piece of paper, another painting etc.. I work on a lot of pieces at
James Kalm visits the exhibition The Triumph of Human Painting at BULL AND RAM, Brooklyn (through March 10), and talks to show curator and painter Katherine Bradford. Bradford comments that the show, featuring one work each by eight artists, is meant to "celebrate a time when painting with humanist impulses and intimacy and personal stories
David Carrier reviews the exhibition Peter Soriano: New Work at Lennon, Weinberg, New York, on view through February 23, 2013. Carrier writes: "What is a painting? For some time, artists have been answering that question in very diverse ways by taking painting apart into its constituent elements. Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray focused our attention
John Yau blogs about an exhibition of paintings by Peter Williams at Foxy Productions, New York, on view through March 23, 2013. Yau writes: "The colors [in Williams' paintings] are reminiscent of both India and the child’s board game Candyland, but the world Williams depicts, and this includes the abstract paintings, is a vulnerable one
On the occasion of the exhibition 50 Prints & Paintings, Toko Shinoda at 100 at the Portland Japanese Garden (through March 17, 2013), Amy Bernstein interviews Norman Tolman, collector and art dealer, about painter Toko Shinoda. Bernstein writes: "The white space in Toko Shinoda's prints and paintings is a mark whose character is defined by
John Motley reviews the exhibition Judy Cooke: Subtext at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, on view through March 2, 2013. Motley writes: "Taken together, the works echo the studio's rhythm of action, assessment and reaction. But there's also a significant historical synthesis occurring in the work, in which the geometric vocabulary of modernism passes through