John Bunker reviews reviews Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at Tate Liverpool, on view through October 18, 2015. Bunker writes: "... the ‘Black Pourings’ that are the throbbing dark heart of this exhibition. Crude materiality and brooding imagery seems to be answering something very different but equally ‘… deep seated in contemporary sensibility.’ Pollock’s ‘gothic- ness’
Mark Van Proyen reviews J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, on view through September 20, 2015. Van Proyen concludes: "Despite whatever claim one might want to make about the complicated relation of Turner’s work to Romanticism (for starters, his politics were of the type that would never embrace the
Sharon Butler blogs about Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, on view through August 16, 2015. Butler writes that Krushenick "is best known for fusing popular culture with non-objective abstraction. The result is an aggressive, eye-popping style, full of bold line, highly saturated color, and visual ambiguity... Anticipating the bold
Charles Giuliano reviews Van Gogh and Nature at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, on view through September 13, 2015. Giuliano writes: "The curators draw extensively from Van Gogh’s letters and from research into the artist’s deep interest in literature and science to explore the influences and themes that dominate much of his work. From
Chris Lowrance, Jennifer Wiggs, and Chris Fletcher discuss Sharon Patten: An Independent Vision at the The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri, on view through August 30, 2015. Chris Lowrance introduces Patten's work, writing: "Patten’s paint is heavy, applied with a knife and so thick that the paintings frequently look different up close than from
Joyce Kozloff remembers a 1972 visit to the home of Georgia O'Keeffe. Kozloff recalls: "One of O’Keeffe’s large paintings of rocks hung behind her as she sat at the table; she had recently completed it. Throughout the 1960s, she had been creating a series of solitary rocks, which nearly filled the paintings’ surfaces. They have
Tom Emery reviews Real Painting at at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, on view through August 2, 2015. The show features works by Simon Callery, Adriano Costa, Deb Covell, Angela de la Cruz, Lydia Gifford, David Goerk, Alexis Harding, Jo McGonigal, DJ Simpson, and Finbar Ward. Emery writes that the show questions "20th century modes of thinking
Geoff Hands reviews Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings 1961 – 2014 at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, on view through September 6, 2015. Hands concludes: "Bridget Riley’s abstract art is clearly modernist, but notwithstanding her traditional training as a painter (she still produces cartoons for her paintings), her work successfully combines a
Amy Bernstein reviews No Boundaries: Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR, on view through Aug 16, 2015. Bernstein writes: "Walking into the exhibition space, I am met by a group of strange peers in the form of paintings. We are painters. We have not met before, but they speak
Louisa Buck interviews painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Verses After Dusk is on view at Serpentine Gallery, London through September 13, 2015. Yiadom-Boakye comments: "For a long time now, I haven’t thought of what I do as portraits—I see them more as figurative paintings. I realised quite early on that I was not so interested
Darragh McNicholas reviews Porfirio DiDonna: Paintings from the 1970s at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view through July 31, 2015. McNicholas writes:"... the 6-foot-tall Untitled (pdn63) (1976) dwarfs me. It’s a dark and unyielding expanse of blue-green, with thousands of miniscule dots horizontally positioned along an invisible grid, each dot the amber color of
Sharon Butler reviews Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden at the New Museum, New York, on view through September 13, 2015. Butler observes: "Oehlen isn’t a worrier. For him painting isn’t about developing a distinctive style or thinking too deeply about a particular shape or line; to the contrary, it’s about creating something unexpected and taking
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange at The Studio Museum Harlem on view through October 25, 2015. Schjeldahl writes: "The works present wobbly grids of variously sized and proportioned blocks of full-strength color in friezelike arrays, separated by brushy horizontal bands.. It’s as if, for each painting, Whitney had climbed a ladder and
John Seed compiles recollections from the students of Elmer Bischoff, whose paintings are on view at the George Adams Gallery, New York, through August 30, 2015. One former student, Bruce Klein, comments: "In my studio I've tacked up this Bischoff quote: 'What is most desired in the final outcome is a condition of form which
Faith McClure reviews Alex Katz, This Is Now at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, on view through September 6, 2015. McClure observes: "What sets Katz apart from the long history of realism, as well as the great canon of abstractionists, is that, at his very best, he can achieve 'realness' through a completely unexpected
Jonathan Stevenson blogs about works by Ruth Root at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, on view through August 14, 2015. Stevenson writes: "Each piece comprises two main elements – digitally-printed fabric of Root’s own design (involving dots, lines, and more elaborate shapes) and a Plexiglas panel enamel- and spray-painted in oblique reference to the pattern
Rebecca Allan reviews the recent exhibition Eric Brown: Vice Versa at Ille Arts, Amagansett. Allan writes: "Brightly illuminated against the whitewashed walls of the gallery, the shimmying plaids and high-keyed, off-kilter stripes of these paintings have the pulsating energy of Scandinavian or African textiles. While their sources and influences are deep and varied, they strike
Arts in Bushwick
Etty Yaniv reviews Avital Burg: Fancy Seeing You at Slag Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through August 9, 2015. Yaniv observes: "Each of Burg’s portraits evokes a distinct sense of staged theatrical drama, in which both the artist and her animate or inanimate models co-inhabit. She affirms that her models have to be people who
Jenny Uglow reviews works by Eric Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, on view through August 31, 2015. Uglow writes that Ravilious "has been called a Romantic Modernist, and his sensibility belongs to a particular English fascination with form, a line that includes the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and the radical architects
Julian Bell reviews The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd on view at Watts Galllery through November 1, 2015. Bell begins: "Portrait painting requires stillness. What, for the subject, is it like to be still? As far as one can tell, the gentleman facing Richard Dadd in 1853 had nothing that he wished to project: his