Janet Goleas reviews Vernacular at Theodore:Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through July 19, 2015. The show features works by Eric Brown, Sharon Butler, Joyce Robins, and Andrew Seto. Goleas writes that the artists "approach abstraction with a shared sense of humility, materiality and ambiguity. Speaking in distinct but related painterly tongues, the works on view
Piri Halasz reviews Jill Nathanson: Fluid Measure at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, on view through June 27, 2015. Halasz writes: "Nathanson’s shapes are bounded by edges that are sometimes straight, sometimes jagged, and occasionally rounded – all within the same picture. They look like pieces of paper that have been cut or torn, nor
Anise Stevens reviews Deborah Martin: The Slabs: The Last Free Place in America at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through July 11, 2015. Stevens writes: "Like Hopper’s paintings, Martin’s interpretations provide neither a critical nor celebratory stance. Rather, they evoke 'an emotional complexity nearly operatic in scope: with the silent, vacant architecture, human
Faith McClure interviews painter Alex Katz on the occasion of the exhibition Alex Katz, This Is Now at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, on view through September 6, 2015. Katz comments: "Style makes everything cohesive. The old guys said style becomes content and content becomes form. That’s the abstract expressionism bible. In my paintings,
Janet McKenzie reviews a retrospective exhibition of works by painter Agnes Martin, on view at Tate Modern through October 11, 2015. McKenzie notes that "[Martin's] works are composed of the simplest formal elements – ruled pencil lines and a limited number of forms, including grids, stripes and, occasionally, circles, triangles and squares, painted in a
Anna Corrigan reviews the recent exhibition Katharina Grosse: The Smoking Kid at Johan König, Berlin. Corrigan observes: "Though this show engages with space and structure in a less explicit way than previous installations and sculpture-based exhibitions, Grosse’s placement of these large-scale paintings in a luminous and immensely spacious gallery successfully questions the relationship between incidental
Blog post revisiting William Rubin's 1963 article “Ellsworth Kelly: The big form,” republished on the occasion of four recent exhibitions of Kelly's work at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. In the article Rubin wrote: "Working from flat Purist painting such as had been in vogue with the Abstraction-Creation group and the painters of the Réalités
Thomas Micchelli reviews works by Andrew Forge on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York through August 14, 2015. Micchelli writes: "'They take a long time to make.' That’s what the British artist and writer Andrew Forge said when he was 'questioned as to the meaning of his paintings,' ... Such a brass-tacks perspective would
Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Peter Fox: Blind Trust at Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, on view through June 21, 2015. Pundyk writes: "The melting ribbons of clear, bright color-groups represent hypothetical nations or advertise various emotional states. Owing to the addition of more water to thin the texture of the paint in the new
James Kalm visits Robert Swain: Color Energy at Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York, on view through July 4, 2015. Kalm observes that "Swain's sophisticated system of color tones, and spatial relations is a unique direction of investigation, with an obsessive side that boarders on the eccentric. This suite of large paintings, produced specifically for the
Sharon Butler blogs about the paintings of Joan Nelson on view Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon through July 13, 2015. Butler notes that "[Nelson's] use of color and value (warm deep browns in the foreground, faint blue-green-purples in the background) afford the images a great sense of distance while the little plant or spit of
A recently discovered essay on Edward Hopper by the late poet and artist Mark Strand. Strand writes: "The coincidence of vision—his idea, vague at first, of what the painting might be—and the brute fact of the subject, its plain obdurate existence, just 'out there' with an absolutely insular existence. Until, that is, Edward Hopper sees
Gordon Stillman interviews painter Jane Irish whose show Faience and Firenze was recently on view at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. Stillman introduces the interview by noting: "I am drawn to the way Irish works, painting en plein air and creating her own source material to remake on ceramics and large canvases. This allows her to re-see,
Studio and Garden
Altoon Sultan blogs about a recent exhibition of paintings by Alex Katz at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York. Sultan writes: "Alex Katz's landscape paintings are a paradox: as large as they are, they seem intimate; they portray ordinary views, yet are surprising and extraordinary... Katz's simple titles––a time of day, a description of place––tell of
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden at the New Museum, New York, on view through September 13, 2015. Schjeldahl notes: "There is as much philosophical heft to what [Oehlen] won’t allow himself, in the ways of order and balance, as in the stuttering virtuosities of what he does. His pictures possess no unity
Rebecca Allan reviews the recent exhibition Deborah Rosenthal: Geography at Bowery Gallery, New York. Allan writes that the paintings on view continue Rosenthal's "ongoing exploration of the nature of time, landscape, family bonds, and metaphors of sight and sensation ... Rosenthal is perpetually concerned with the “what-ifs” of the painting process. She considers the velocity
Ross Simonini interviews artist Roger White. White comments: "I feel that even when I’m working more or less abstractly it’s still a picture. It’s still engaged in the question, 'What does it mean to represent some thing in the world in some way?' And without that question I’m totally lost as an artist. I started
Andy Parkinson reviews Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern, London, on view through August 9, 2015. Parkinson writes: "The Delaunays understood the implications of abstraction as a totally new visual language, the central focus of which was simultaneous colour contrast, Sonia claiming that '…the infinite combinations of colour have poetry and a language much more expressive
Viktor Witkowski considers the evocation of place in paintings by Tintoretto. Witkwoski writes: "Venetian painting is often discussed with respect to the use of color which set it apart from other regions in Italy and Northern Europe at that time. But in case of Tintoretto the natural phenomena of the lagoon, the changing conditions of
Altoon Sultan blogs about Cecily Brown: The English Garden at Maccarone, New York, on view through June 20, 2015. Sultan writes that Brown's show "was a lesson to me in slowing down, looking carefully, and being open to new work... As I looked, I became entranced by the welter of brushstrokes; their layering is full