An interview with painter Svenja Deininger whose show Untitled / Head was recently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Deininger comments: "My work can be like a sentence. It is about combining single paintings in a space like there are single words in a sentence and finally in a story. In their combination
John Yau reviews Eleanor Ray: Paintings at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through December 24, 2015. Yau writes: "[Ray's] cropping also reminds us that every view is partial. We cannot step back and see everything; we can only get closer. Within these demarcated areas, Ray uses a lightly textured skin of
Phyllis Tuchman reviews Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, on view through February 14, 2016. Tuchman writes: "Though he exhibited with the Impressionists—and even underwrote some of their most important group exhibitions—it was the modernity of Caillebotte’s compositions, not sketchy stylistic traits, that qualified him for inclusion in
Ken Johnson reviews an exhibition of paintings by Cary Smith at Fredericks & Freiser, New York, on view through January 9, 2016. Johnson writes that "[Smith's] works don’t aim to deflate Modernist art à la Sherrie Levine and others of the Neo-Geo trend of the 1980s. There’s a sense, rather, of personally expressive import to
Matt Phillips interviews painter Matt Kleberg. Kleberg observes that "[the] idea of expectation and disappointment goes back to the form. I love this idea. These paintings are like frames within frames within frames within frames. There’s a lot of framing. There are stripes. Everything is rhythmic. And some have curtains drawn back and everything is
Allie Biswas interviews curator Courtney J. Martin about the work of Robert Ryman on the occasion of an exhibition of works by Ryman at Dia:Chelsea, New York, on view through June 18, 2016. Martin comments: "it was never just white paint: at the very beginning, he was simply experimenting. In many ways, it’s not just
Altoon Sultan blogs about two exhibitions currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery, New York: Giorgio Morandi and Donald Judd (both on view through December 19). Sultan writes that at the Judd show: "Here was work that was intensely formal––about shape and dimension and repetition and balance and weight and color––that was so beautiful in
Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein interviews painter Stephen Westfall. Westfall comments: "The broken harlequin grid paintings have an element that is a new development inside this developing language of my painting, which I am looking forward to pursuing. Though right now I am kind of locked in to this sense of torqued space. That’s the space that is
Laurence Noga interviews Simon Callery whose show Flat Paintings was recently on view at FOLD Gallery, London. Callery comments: "The questioning of flatness, which I believe is very important, is that I recognized that flatness is the product of image-based painting. It had to be flat to communicate as clearly as possible. I am not
Xico Greenwald reviews Eleanor Ray: Paintings at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through December 24) and Zach Harris: Must Chill at Feuer/Mesler (through December 19). Greenwald writes that both Harris and Ray's works are products of "expeditions to view Renaissance masterworks in the churches and museums of Italy and France... Ray’s postcard-sized pictures are perfectly
John Mendelsohn reviews the recent exhibition Simon Hantaï: Blancs at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Mendelsohn begins: "The Blancs, a series of paintings that Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) created in the early 1970s, have shards of transparent color that are arrayed over expanses of white space. These delicate large-scale works vary in the intensity of their
Jennifer Landes reviews Jane Freilicher and Jane Wilson: Seen and Unseen at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, on view through January 18, 2016. Landes writes: "Both born in 1924, [Freilicher and Wilson] were two of the very last of a glittering and venerated generation of artists and writers left standing before their
Richard Moss previews Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway (1880 - 1928), which will be on view at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London from February 5 - May 15 2016. Moss writes: "Rather like Stanley Spencer’s, Cookham, it was Astrup’s home at Sandalstrand (now known as ‘Astruptunet’) in the district of Jølster that became his muse and inspiration.
Andrea Kirsh reviews Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), on view through April 3, 2016. Kirsh writes: "Lewis’ great subject was mankind, not the individual but the community, undifferentiated as to race or background. His abstractions and his processions, parades, marches, and crowd scenes—abstract at a distance
Sarah Rose Sharp reviews Brenda Goodman: Selected Works 1961–2015 continues at CCS Center Galleries, Detroit, and Brenda Goodman: A Life on Paper at Paul Kotula Projects (both on view through Dec 19). Rose Sharp writes that Goodman's oeuvre "is a little bit difficult to sum up, perhaps, because over the course of this long and
Poet Bill Corbett shares his thoughts on Franz Kline with Noah Dillon. Corbett remarks: "I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate
Roberta Smith reviews works by Robert Ryman at Dia:Chelsea, New York, on view through June 18, 2016. Smith writes: "In effect, Mr. Ryman has spent his career circling Point A, proving that there are an infinite number of ways to meet painting’s basic requirements... It helps to think of Mr. Ryman as a kind of
Patricia Maloney reviews Lawren Harris: The Idea of North at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, on view through January 24, 2016. Maloney writes: "The paintings in The Idea of North are fluid, frictionless semblances of place, composed of rhythmic forms that fold and undulate. They are ideas instead of sites. Each group shares the distinctive
Philip A. Hartigan reviews Anne Harris: Coddled and Bruised at Cultivator, Chicago, on view through December 13, 2015. Hartigan writes that "[Harris's] new series mostly consists of roughly-painted torsos, seen from the front. The outline of arms and a body sometimes emerges from the monochromatic ground via thinly painted marks, or is announced loudly with
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve interviews artist Joseph Nechvatal whose exhibition Odyssey pandemOnium : a migrational metaphor is on view at Galerie Richard, New York through December 16, 2015. Asked why he refers to his recent works as paintings, Nechvatal responds "Because they are one-of-a-kind painted canvases that have been airbrush spray painted through a computer-robotic driven