Joanne Greenbaum: Structure and Flow
Big Red & Shiny

Liza Bingham reviews Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, on view through April 7, 2018. Bingham writes: “The abstract paintings in the Anderson Auditorium, all untitled, are ultimately nothing if not self-portraits, of a kind. They reveal Greenbaum’s compulsive drawing practice, writ large on […]

Back When Painting Was Dead
Hyperallergic

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 overlooked […]

Brett Baker, New Paintings @ Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Painters’ Table readers are invited to an exhibition of my new paintings at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York.

Thomas Nozkowski @ Pace Gallery
Brooklyn Rail

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 […]

Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books

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 the heyday of […]

Alix Bailey: Interview
The Studio Visit

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 on Henri Matisse
Painters on Paintings

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 […]

John Walker: At the Edge of Land and Water
artcritical

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 […]

Byron Kim’s Painting Ritual
Two Coats of Paint

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. Instead, they are […]

Laura Owens and the New American Century
Painting: Martin Mugar

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 […]

Laura Owens: Art in Free Fall
New York Review of Books

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 […]

Cézanne Portraits: Relentless Intimacy
London Review of Books

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. It offers […]

Sensate Wisdom: Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough

Through the decades Desiderio’s “sensate wisdom,” the unique visualizing capabilities Alberti ascribed to painting, have persevered, balanced with a savvy contemporary approach to subject.

Pat Adams @ Victoria Munroe Fine Art
artcritical

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, mixed media work. […]

Christian Bonnefoi: Taking the Painter Out of Painting
Hyperallergic

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 […]

Joel Longenecker: Studio Visit
Gorky's Granddaughter

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 I […]

Watteau’s Eloquent Formalism
Painting Perceptions

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, […]

Laura Owens: The Sky Is the Limit
ARTnews

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, […]

Laura Owens: Moving Targets
Art in America

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 transcendent […]

John Walker @ the New York Studio School
Arte Fuse

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 […]