Mira Schor blogs about a visit to Chris Ofili: Night and Day at The New Museum, New York, (through January 25) and Benny Andrews' painting No More Games (1970) on view at MoMA. Refelecting on Ofili's work Schor writes: "Each floor tells a story and each room is not just a space to stick some
Janet McKenzie interviews painter Dan Coombs on the occasion of the recent exhibition Jerwood Encounters: Suspicion (curated by Coombs) at the Jerwood Visual Arts Gallery, London. Coombs comments: "The problem in painting is not one of quality, it is one of realness. Realness is quality, and this applies as much to abstract art as figurative
Elana Hagler plots examples of contemporary representational painting on an Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. Hagler concludes: "My hope in exploring these categories [Classical, Observational, and Constructed] and the wide range of Apollonian and Dionysian traits contained in each one is to show that choices of painting style, that visual predilections and affinities, directly result from our deeply
Peter Schjeldahl reviews The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, on view through April 5, 2015. The show features works by works by Richard Aldrich, Joe Bradley, Kerstin Brätsch, Matt Connors, Michaela Eichwald, Nicole Eisenman, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu,
Charles Stein interviews painter Philip Taaffe about his work. Taaffe's recent paintings will be on view at Luhring Augustine Bushwick from January 17 - April 26, 2015. Taaffe comments: "I always feel that I’m a medium. My ideal condition is to be outside of the work and to let these transmissions take place on the
Anna McNay interviews painter Maggi Hambling. Hambling's show Walls of Water is on view at the National Gallery, London (thorugh February 15) and Walls of Water: The Monotypes is on view at Marlborough Fine Art, London (through January 10). Hambling comments: "My great thing is that the subject dictates to me, so those waves are
Greg Cook interviews painter Mark Bradford on the occasion of his recent exhibition Sea Monsters at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Bradford comments: "I started thinking about explorers. In these 16th and 17th century maps, that were basically these guys were bringing sexy cash and buying houses, buying land. That’s when I really started
Charles Hope reviews Giovanni Battista Moroni on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, through January 25, 2015. Hope begins by noting: "The assessment of Giovanni Battista Moroni written in 1648 by Carlo Ridolfi, his first biographer, has never been seriously challenged. Ridolfi says that Moroni, a pupil of Alessandro Moretto of Brescia, had
P. Lemarquis reviews works by Claude Rutault at Galerie Perrotin, New York, on view through January 3, 2015. Lemarquis notes that "Rutault, a painter who does not paint his own pieces, or even take part in overseeing the construction of the pieces, operates as an instigator of ideas and sets of rules that translate into
Joseph Nechvatal reviews Sonia Delaunay: Les couleurs de l’abstraction at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, on view through February 22, 2015. Nechvatal writes: "In our period of the rampant merging of art and fashion, it is refreshing to revisit where this hybridization more or less began ... The show illustrates the
John Held, Jr. interviews painter, poet, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti about his life and work. Ferlinghetti recalls: "the Six Gallery was associated with the Beats, not with the painters in the Bay Area Figurative group like Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and David Parks. There was quite a divide there... there was no communication between these two
Margaret Atkinson writes the inspiring influence of Louise Fishman. Atikinson remembers that during class "Fishman barely talked. She looked. She looked carefully. She looked at. I don’t know if she knew that I was a) shy and b) demoralized, but I certainly felt respected. Beyond that, over time, I was made to feel that I
In a new piece of appropriative writing, Anne Sherwood Pundyk explores the continual possibilities of painting by combining brief statements from various "artists, writers, art historians, and critics." The following stanza includes quotes sourced from Robert Evrén, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Roberta Smith, John Elderfield, and Bonnie Clearwater: "Situated near the edge of visibility, / painting
Joanne Mattera photo blogs mid-century abstract paintings on view at the 2014 Miami Art Fairs. Mattera introduces the post noting: "One of the great things about the fairs, particularly Art Basel Miami Beach, is the amount of mid-century abstract painting that is shown, much of it geometric. (I'm stretching "mid century" to mean an almost
Sharon Butler visits the studio of painter Suzanne Joelson. Butler notes that: "Although she works abstractly, Joelson is fiercely interested in politics and current events, and the daily agitation prompted by the news informs her work. We had a long conversation about the aesthetic choices artists make, and how those choices can be rooted in
Heather Elizabeth Garland reviews the recent exhibition Katherine Bradford: Shelf Paintings at Arts+Leisure, New York. Garland writes that: "Each painting from the beginning of the show to the end is thoroughly felt in three dimensions, offering detail from all views with front and center being the ultimate read. This gives the work a performative feel
D. Dominick Lombardi interviews painter John Mendelsohn on the occasion of his exhibition Drawings, Studies, and Works on Paper at Kook Projects, New York, on view through January 9, 2015. In the show, earlier narrative works are exhibited alongside more recent abstract paintings. About the latter Mendelsohn comments: "For the past fifteen years I have
Julia Couzens reviews Charline von Heyl: Ten New Etchings at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, on view through January 2, 2014. Couzens writes that von Heyl "is nothing if not flexible — canceling and subtracting intuitive moves, constructing unstable, open-ended formal juxtapositions into befuddling works that remain in a constant state of flux. We glimpse
John Yau reviews Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil at the Morgan Library & Museum, on view through January 25, 2015. Yau writes: "In Twombly’s case, every scribble and scrawl feels absolutely necessary. This is how the drawings in the exhibition came across, and I could only marvel at them. Through the placement of the
Raphael Rubinstein considers the paintings of Stephen Mueller. Rubinstein writes: "For all his lifelong commitment to abstraction, Mueller took a great deal from Neo-Expressionism. Many of the pictorial devices as well as a sense of glamorous drama in his 1980s paintings recall elements from Polke, Schnabel, Salle, while some of the brushwork looks borrowed from