Link posts — Page 6

John Yau "[takes] issue with ... [the] myth that painting, after taking a hiatus in the 1970s, 'returned' in the 1980s. This view justifies the fact that painting was ignored or denigrated during the 1970s, as it verifies the appetites of the marketplace... In narrowing down painting, as [critics] Greenberg, Stella, and Judd did, they

William Corbett reviews an exhibition of paintings by Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through February 15, 2018. Corbett writes that Nozkowski's paintings "have a cheerful and clear engagement with their world. They do not ask to be read or figured out. They belong to that strain of twentieth century American painting

Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show "[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of 'pure painting'—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is 'parrot colored'—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in

John Mitchell interviews painter Alix Bailey. An exhibition of recent paintings by Bailey is on view at The Painting Center, New York, through February 24, 2018. Bailey comments: "Right now I’m painting mostly larger longer-term paintings of the whole figure and I’m changing the way that I work. I’ve become increasingly interested in finding a

John Goodrich considers Henri Matisse's Laurette in Green Robe (Black Background) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Goodrich observes: "We ... may become aware of something particularly lively about this semblance of a woman in a chair: the sense of her weight, and how her forms expand rhythmically across the chair, which

Wendy Gittler reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush recently on view at the New York Studio School. Gittler writes: "Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and

Sharon Butler reviews Byron Kim: Sunday Paintings at James Cohan Gallery, New York, on view through February 17, 2018. Butler writes: "What makes [Kim's paintings] unremarkable are their size and the undramatic skies they depict – not the complex, sublime sky paintings made by, say, great Dutch painters like Aelbert Cuyp and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Martin Mugar considers recent critical attention to the work of Laura Owens whose mid-career retrospective was recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Mugar writes: "The post-modern view implicates that we are always moving away from our origins, yet even in the continual distancing from the origins something of the

David Salle writes about the work of Laura Owens on the occasion of a recent mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens' work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Salle writes: "Owens’s paintings are squarely in the middle of a postmodern aesthetic that’s been gaining momentum for the last ten or fifteen years. It

T.J. Clark reviews Cézanne Portraits on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London (through February 11) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from March 25 - July 1, 2018. Clark writes: "Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve ... is useless.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Pat Adams: Then Found at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York, on view through January 27, 2018. Pundyk writes: "The works in Then Found span the years 1997 to 2016. This is only a third of the more than six decades Adams has spent building her extensive body of perceptual, non-figurative,

Gwenaël Kerlidou writes about the work of Christian Bonnefoi. Kerlidou writes: "Bonnefoi’s strategies seem to condense a few aspects of the work of his American contemporaries: the objectification and theatricalization of a gesture devoid of pathos of David Reed; the deconstructing strategies of Jonathan Lasker — even if Lasker’s use of exaggeratedly thick brushstrokes seems

Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Joel Longenecker. Longenecker explains: "... what I really want to create is a slab [of nature] ... I remember having a thought ... I wanted to be able to go out into nature with a giant carving knife and carve out a chunk of what

John Goodrich visits Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection and shares his observations about Watteau's striking formalism. Goodrich writes: "Superficially, Watteau is all fanciful froth – charming subject matter, feathery modeling, a light, darting touch. But what distinguishes Watteau are his extraordinary and comprehensive intuitions about formal rhythms — in this case,

Phyllis Tuchman reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens' work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Tuchman writes that Owen's recent abstract works "are bold, handsome works that exemplify how a new wave of artists is approaching the making of abstract paintings. Instead of appropriating, say,

Nancy Princenthal reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens' work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Princenthal writes: "What critics offer often in defense of abstract painting amounts to proclaiming its unique sincerity—the argument is that good painting is, perhaps singularly, unironic in its quest for

Jonathan Goodman reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush at the New York Studio School, on view through January 21, 2018. Goodman writes: "The directness of Walker’s abstractions, highly patterned in their composition and emotionally direct, claim our attention by virtue of their immediacy and their freedom from pretense. Walker seems to have internalized

Stephen Maine reviews Ryan Crotty: Never the Less at High Noon Gallery, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Maine writes: "To the extent that Crotty’s work is about the fluid movement of color across the surface, it can be viewed in terms of Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler

John Mitchell interviews painter Heather Morgan on the occasion of her exhibition Heavenly Creatures at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through January 28th, 2018. Morgan comments: "The figures I paint today still tend to be eccentric, fringe of society characters, larger than life... I get excited by raw displays of emotion, the

Joe Lloyd reviews Rose Wylie: Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, on view through February 11, 2018. Lloyd writes: "There is another tension in Wylie’s work, between intentionality and spontaneity... Wylie’s work thrives on memory’s entropy, on the way we organise the floating odds and ends of our minds. Human, all too human,