Adrian Dannatt reviews Jan Frank: Seven Months on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery until June 18, 2011. Dannatt writes: "Frank's 'line,' however serendipitous and inspired by the chance operations we know from John Cage, has an ease, an absolute rightness to it... These drawings are inspired by sessions with six different life models, and one
Larry Groff posts great links, images, and books related to painter/critic Fairfield Porter. Groff includes many quotes from Porter including: "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful. This partly means that a painting should contain a mystery, but not
David Moxon posts about the exhibition Zhan Rui: The Stock Exchange, Weather, and Sex on view at Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing until June 19, 2011. Moxon notes that Rui's works initially appear related to the minimal spirituality of Ad Reinhardt (or perhpas Agnes Martin). However, as he quotes critic Sun Dongdong, "[Rui's paintings] do not belong
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting video interview with painter Erin O'Brien. O'Brien discusses her painting process and the latent presence of narrative in her paintings.
Laura Bushell interviews painter Phoebe Unwin about her work, including a discussion (and images) of Unwin's sketchbooks. Unwin says: "They're somewhere where I start to work out particular combinations of form, colour, mark... very much a reference tool in that it's somewhere to refer to that feels really close to first instinct. But it's a
Fantastic essay by Guy Davenport on the art of Simon Dinnerstein. Davenport writes: "Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych is so symmetrically a harmony and so richly a composite of genres (family portrait, still life, landscape, and a collage that amounts to a complex poem)..." Davenport continues, describing the transition from the northern european influenced works like
A preview of work in the exhibition Among the Breakage: New Painting from Providence which opens June 11, 2011 at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University and continues through July 10, 2011. "Work in this exhibition ranges from hard-edged abstraction to hybrid figurative landscapes and techniques that stretch the very definition of painting."
John Seed tells the little known story of Edith Park Truesdell (1888-1986) "a painter, a teacher, a writer and a poet." Truesdell, a contemporary of Georgia O'Keeffe, studied with Frank Weston Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School in 1906. Her lifelong devotion to painting was an inspiration to her nephew San
Paul Behnke blogs installation images of the painting exhibition Three: Damien Flood, Joy Garnett, Andrew Seto, "a studied exhibition of contemporary abstractions that blur the lines between figuration and non-objectivity," on view at Theodore:Art through June 19, 2011. Behnke's photos highlight the installation which the gallery "hung in a way that emphasizes the similarities and
David Moxon posts about an exhibition of "strong monolithic forms of abstraction" by Wang Guangle at Beijing Commune, China. Moxon writes "In the 'Coffin Paint' series, the accidental dots protruding from the surface are hints of the slow progression of the artist’s work of 'experiencing', through which Wang Guangle appreciates the meaning of 'time' over
Leah Ollman reviews the exhibition Michael Wingo: Squeeze Series on view through June 4, 2011 at Gallery K|M in Santa Monica. In the paintings Wingo employs a radically stretched picture plane in works that are 1 foot high and 9 feet across. Ollman writes: "Arranging flat colored planes across the canvas almost like a cut-paper
Joanna Moorhead marks the passing of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), "one of Britain's finest - and neglected - surrealists." Carrington, whose artistic company included Max Ernst, Picasso, Dali, and Max Ernst, settled in Mexico where she lived and worked until her death. In an excellent 2007 article on the artist Moorhead quotes Carrington: "You
Matthew Farina reviews Todd Kelly: Signature Paintings at Asya Geisberg Gallery on view through June 18, 2011. Farina writes, "References to commercial or industrial printing are present alongside more traditional approaches to paint application... The interplay of man and machine-made marks is pronounced... With the constant of the 'signature' in place, Kelly’s formula as a
As part of a series on "emerging perceptual painters who explore inventive possibilities to an old tradition," Larry Groff posts about the work of painter Brian Rego. Groff admires Rego's "vigorous treatment of the paint surface and a gritty abstract structure."
Paul Behnke posts about painter Peter Pinchbeck (1931-2000). In addition to images of Pinchbeck's work, Behnke also includes a link to and a quote from the article Need to Believe by Pinchbeck's son Daniel: "... The work he left behind is probing and profound, abject and obstinate, luminous and eerie, eccentric yet true to its
Altoon Sultan posts about Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works at Cheim & Read on view until June 25, 2011. Sultan writes: "what made the use of fabric so different from paint... it is the vulnerability of fabric, its fragility that lends a special poignancy to the work. Paint is so robust in comparison. And even
The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection blog posts about their long history collaborating with artist Frank Stella on his prints and sculptures. The post documents "the serendipitous and open-minded way Frank finds many of his images. With a Melville-like appreciation of high and low, squalid and pristine, silly and serious, it is no wonder that 'stuff'
Sheldon Tapley reviews the exhibition Narrative Figuration at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati on view through June 5, 2011. Tapley notes that the five painters in the show, Robert Anderson, Daniel O'Connor, Tim Parsley, Emil Robinson and Tina Tammaro, have each committed to "a curiously old-fashioned choice: to keep making pictures by hand, using
Continuing their excellent series of video studio visits, Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting interview painter Moses Hoskins about his work. Hoskins notes that the abstract forms in his paintings "gives me something to work around... a substitution for a figure... you can still have a narrative… going on… you still get the theatre..."
Artist Steve Roden posts some thoughts on the work of Blinky Palermo sparked by the juxtaposition of a Palermo work, Projektion, with one of Roden's own paintings in the exhibition Time Again at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Palermo's Projektion is "a photographic document of a projection of a red and blue painting