Published Oct 12, 2022 by The Brooklyn Rail
Any ambitious painter faces a conundrum: what can a painting say today that hasn’t already been said? Some artists, chastened by the historical record, may phrase it a little differently: how to paint something worth . .. (more)

Published Oct 6, 2022 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Certain traits – a mischievous spirit, a shrewd take on history, a love of the sheer materiality of paint – will always stand an artist in good stead. John Bradford possesses all of these, plus others that are .. (more)

Published Sept 28, 2022 by The New York Sun
Celebrated — and at times reviled — for his scalpel-sharp visions of the exotic and the morbid, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) influenced his cultural milieu deeply: everything from Art Nouveau to the British.. .. (more)

Published May 15, 2022 by The New York Sun
When it comes to modern and postmodern art, much is made of process: how and why an image is made, the meaning of a work’s materiality, the historical context of the artist’s approach. Less frequently .. (more)

Published March 10, 2022 by The New York Sun
The Brooklyn Museum is one of the city’s largest and possesses some of the nation’s finest collections of Egyptian, African, and Oceanic art, but has always struggled in the shadows of its Manhattan.. .. (more)

Published Oct 24, 2021 by The New York Sun
Rackstraw Downes’s stature as one of today’s most important “realist” painters is secure, but perhaps we can be excused for thinking of him as also a brilliant poet/engineer. During the past six decades. .. (more)

Published Oct 24, 2021 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Janice Nowinski’s paintings perform a neat bit of deception. They’re usually fairly dark and small in scale, and yet they somehow feel buoyant and expansive. Her forms are awkward, their details abbreviated. .. (more)

Published Oct 24, 2021 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Philip Guston (1913-1980), whose early Abstract-Expressionist paintings must be counted among the politest of that burly movement, had a way of rudely awakening us. In 1970, he famously startled .. (more)

Oct 1, 2021
Generosity of spirit and curiosity about our world must surely rate high among virtues, and for decades we’ve known we can count on an abundance of both in the work of Lois Dodd. Art movements have come and .. (more)

Sept 25, 2021
If Ying Li’s paint application suggests a furious restlessness, her work has been, for many years, no less unsettled in terms of geography. Over the years, the artist’s motifs have included landscapes in .. (more)

Published April 8, 2021by artcritical.com
Albers and Morandi, an exceedingly handsome, thought provoking show, probes the surprising affinities between two very different mid-20th-century artists. Walking through its large rooms of small, widely spaced. .. (more)

Published Feb 10, 2021, by artcritical.com
n Montauk, NY, BCK Fine Arts is no longer the only commercial gallery in town: Chase Contemporary and South Etna, new COVID-era ouposts of Manhattan dealers, opened their doors in July. Out on the .. (more)

Published Dec 19, 2018 by Hyperallergic.com
To the savvy, postmodernist eye, the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1786-1875) may be easier to like than to revere. A glance reveals their superficial charms: his landscapes’ feathery, silver-toned strokes, .. (more)

Published Oct 30, 2018 by Hyperallergic.com
Ruth Miller’s lifework is a beacon for a certain philosophy of painting. Now in her late 80s, Miller is relatively unknown outside a particular subculture of the painting world, one that included her former friends and .. (more)

Published Oct 8, 2018 by Hyperallergic.com
Painter Victor Pesce, it could be said, spent his life plying the divide between the “there” and “not there.” His most familiar work — those late austere still lifes from the 1990s, consisting often of a single bottle or. .. (more)

Published February, 2018 by Hyperallegic.com
In large measure, ideas are what make us human. Our ability to conceive and communicate them is one of the things that most distinguishes us from other species. For the majority of us, most of the time, these ideas .. (more)

Published March 6, 2018 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Over the long course of her life as a painter, Mari Lyons (1935-2016) explored a wide range of genres, from portraits to still lifes, interiors and landscapes. All these subjects she rendered with a modernist’s flair. .. (more)

Published Jan 17, 2018 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Formalism. In today’s art world, the word denotes a particular side-aisle in the great bazaar of artistic practices. It tends to be an especially austere and cerebral aisle, one that asserts the .. (more)

Nov 23, 2017
A first impression of Ying Li’s paintings sticks in the mind. Entering an installation of her work, one immediately takes in swirls of paint, applied so thickly and furiously that only after a moment one recognizes ... (more)

August 1, 2017
Mari Lyons’ fifteen solo exhibitions at First Street Gallery left us with a vivid picture of her lifelong preoccupations as an artist, and of the particular mixture of earnestness, curiosity and humor that she brought ... (more)

Published June 6, 2017 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Time was, painters were drawn to notions of the epic. All manner of artists–from Titian to Goya to Picasso– tried their hand at grand mythological or historical themes. Even when the .. (read full article)

Published Oct 5, 2017 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Expressionist painting might seem simply a matter of strong passions and quick reflexes – an instinctive, almost automatic, unburdening of the soul. In reality, in order to persuade, an Expressionist must .. (read full article)

Published Oct 21, 2016 by Hyperallergic.com
Beneath their crude surfaces, Janice Nowinski’s paintings harbor a wealth of expression. In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly “low,” unpolished approach with ..(read full article)

March 22, 2017
At one point – over a decade ago – Simon Carr was producing large paintings with overtly religious themes, in complex, swirling compositions suited to his dramatic subjects: “The Miracle at Cana" ... (more)

Published Oct 21, 2016 by Hyperallergic.com
With their heightened colors and abstracted, organic forms, Gregory Amenoff’s paintings hark back to the dawn of American Modernism — back to Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, who similarly . ..(read full article)

Published Oct 13, 2016 by PaintingPerceptions.com
Kyle Staver is a colorist, and one of the best around – which is only to say that in her paintings she makes every color count. In art school, they drill into students the three properties of color – hue, tone, ... (read full article)

Sept 30, 2016
Painting, of course, encompasses all manner of pursuits, including both the cerebral abstractions of Josef Albers and the impassioned representations of Soutine. To an intriguing degree, Hearne Pardee’s recent ... (more)

April 22, 2016
We’re not there yet, but I see it coming: the day when the totality of life shines before us, simply and purely, as just the mother of all apps. And once we come to understand life as a miraculous platform, then eyesight ... (more)

Published March 28, 2016 by Artcritical.com
What does it mean to paint representationally? For a Photorealist, it means a point-by-point recapitulation: the fixed, dispassionate vantage point of a camera. For a more tradition-minded painter ...(read full article)

March 19, 2016
Trygve Lie Gallery may occupy a windowless basement, but it’s spacious and elegantly lit – and at the moment it boasts an especially vivid impression of broad sunlight, thanks to the nearly 30 seascapes ... (more)

Published March 10, 2016 by Hyperallergic.com
From the if-only-I’d-listened-to-mom archives:
"I have suffered, and still suffer, from an unendurable infirmity of the eyes, which has been occasioned by my own folly. For while, this year... (read full article)

February 19, 2016
Painter Ken Kewley definitely has a style, and for some visitors to Gross McCleaf, his tapestries of intensely colored geometric shapes might recall the decorative energy of the P & D movement of the 70s... (more)

Published February 11, 2016 by Hyperallergic.com
Mernet Larsen claims an unlikely pair of influences: 15th-century Italian painting and the austere abstractions of the Russian modernist El Lissitzky (1890–1941). But linger a while in front of her ... (read full article)

Published November 2, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
With their vintage timber beams and rough stuccoed walls, the exhibition spaces in John Davis Gallery’s carriage house could easily upstage any artwork within. This is especially the case with the ... (read full article)

Nov 18, 2015
If the eye is the aperture of the artist’s perceptions, the palette is the crucible for her expressions. It’s the physical locus – only a square foot or so in surface area – where pigments, combined in ratios of infinite ... (more)

Published October 5, 2015 by Artcritical.com
In her still life paintings, Susan Jane Walp exhibits a unique way of blending the delicate with the dynamic, and the empathetic with the strategic. The artist clearly has a predilection for square, nearly ... (read full article)

Published June 9, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
If painting were merely a style — just an evocative pose channeling the gestalt of a time and place — then Don Voisine’s spare, elegant abstractions might be the equivalent of Leonardo DiCaprio ... (read full article)

May 13, 2015
With her latest exhibition at Bowery, Deborah Rosenthal continues to tackle lyrical subjects with a limpid, dream-  like semi-abstraction reminiscent of Paul Klee or Robert Delaunay. Though thoroughly modernist ... (more)

Published May 18, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
In terms of freewheeling, soul-bearing angst, Abstract Expressionism might once seemed to have had the final word. Instead, Abstract Expressionism led to all manner of variations and reactions ... (read full article)

May 13, 2015
The titles of Deborah Kahn’s paintings (“Figure Group Orange,” “Circular Form with Figures”) are straightforward enough. So is her style; her abstracted figure compositions, with their somewhat austere  ... (more)

Published April 26, 2015 by PaintingPerceptions.com
The painter John Dubrow has already made his mark on the New York art scene. But what is especially rewarding about his latest work, currently on view at Lori Bookstein, is the way it continues to explore ... (read full article)

Published April 20, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
At this very moment, Vermeer may be spinning like a lathe in his grave. Or, just maybe, he’s executing a slow, pleasurable shimmy. In either case, the proximate cause would be Walk-In Pantry ... (read full article)

Published April 13, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
Gagosian has done it again: produced another museum-quality show, this one devoted to images of artists’ studios, as recorded in photographs (on view at its uptown gallery) and in paintings ... (read full article)

Published Jan 16, 2015 by Hyperallergic.com
Pick up a survey of modern art, start scanning the 1930s, and you may come across a paragraph or two on the French painter Jean Hélion (1904–1987). You’ll learn that this artist was a founding member ... (read full article)

January 14, 2015
With her latest exhibition at June Kelly, Su-Li Hung continues to pursue an idiom of painterly representation that is often abstracted and always richly colorful. But the series of triptychs   .. (more)

Published Dec 17, 2014 by Hyperallergic.com
You could say that art history is the documentation of periodic fatigue.  Fatigued by academic art, the nineteenth-century public warmed to Impressionism. Tired of sunny Impressionism  ... (read full article)

Published Oct 31, 2014 by Artcritical.com
Few painters have expanded the original impulses of Abstract-Expressionism in more directions than John Walker. During the course of his half-century of painting, he has incorporated into his canvases ... (more)

Published Aug 4, 2014 by Hyperallergic.com
Bruce Gagnier’s life-size figure sculptures have been popping up everywhere this past year: at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, the National Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters ... (read full article)

July 31, 2014
Jane Culp’s landscapes possess something all too rare these days: a gutsy, go-for-broke attack, coupled with a feeling for the subtleties of traditional composition. For some thirty years, Culp has brought an... (more)

July 25, 2014
Leland Bell (1922-1991) was in many ways an artist outside of his own time. Moving to New York in the early 1940s, he became acquainted with a number of the future Abstract Expressionists – he argued about ... (more)

Published July 9, 2014 by The Chautauquan Daily
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) would count among the most intriguing and difficult-to-categorize of American artists. In his early years in Ohio, he produced works truly radical for their time: fantastical ...(read full article)

Published July 2, 2014 by Hyperallergic.com
The Museum of Modern Art’s current offerings include, just possibly, the world’s most brilliant student of a certain kind of art. The student would be the German postmodernist Sigmar Polke... (read full article)

May 23, 2014
The small, gem-like gouaches that Janet Gorzegno has produced over the years seem to follow two different tracks: the depictions of human heads, which are notable for both their fineness of modeling and ... (more)

May 6, 2014
In painting, an assurance of technique is one thing, the actual depth of insight another. Happily, the two go together in the paintings of Ying Li, whose thick, turgid brushstrokes and heightened colors... (read more)

Published April 16, 2014 by Hyperallergic.com
At the age of 27, painter Eleanor Ray has already made something of a critical splash. Last year, New Republic art critic Jed Perl wrote about her first solo show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects ... (read full article)

First published Feb 8, 2014 by Artcritical.com
Something mysterious happens when a painter commits impressions of nature to canvas. Even though the act of painting involves reductions — simplifications of form, omissions of detail— expressiveness is... (more)

Published Jan 5, 2014 by Hyperallergic.com
Consider two reds: a pure cadmium red medium — all fiery denseness — alongside a burnt sienna, equal in tone but utterly different in character: subdued, stoic, retiring. They jostle and shift... (read full article)

First published Dec 23, 2013 by Artcritical.com
Barbara is back on the streets of New York for her annual visit. She has been roaming the Lower East Side this frosty season, picking a new sidewalk each day.  Admission is free, and her legal... (more)

First published on Dec 5, 2013 by CityArts.info
“Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals,” a jewel of an exhibition, represents the collaboration of two gems of institutions: the Frick and the Mauritshuis, both of which showcase small but world-class collections in stately... (more)

Published on Nov 21, 2013 by Hyperallergic.com
We know how a handful of painters—Pollock, de Kooning, and company—wrested modernism from the Old World to create a new kind of art...Less well-known is the story of how another group of painters... (read full article)

November 13, 2013
Why is it that one of the least appetizing words in the English language illuminates some of our most transcendent experiences? Applied to the arts, the word “plastic” has of course nothing to do with ... (more)

November 8, 2013
Combining deft brushwork with evocative color, the work in Elizabeth O’Reilly’s ninth show at George Billis rewards in all the ways we’ve come to expect. Her 31 small landscapes, cityscapes and shore scenes ... (more)

October 25, 2013
If you missed the John Lees exhibition at Betty Cuningham last spring, you can catch up with the artist’s work (and in fact view a number of the same pieces) at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, where ... (more)

October 13, 2013
Mari Lyons’ current exhibition includes what may be her strongest work to date. Oil paintings dominate the nearly three dozen garden-inspired works in this installation, which also includes pastels and a watercolor ... (more)

October 9, 2013
One admires certain painters despite their compulsions. Consider Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the remarkable 19th-century painter whose polished surfaces suggest a painter who—to paraphrase Rouault ... (more)

First published on Sept 24, 2013 by CityArts.info
These days we’re nothing if not connected. And so is our art; one of the most salient features of contemporary art is the drive for inclusiveness—for the dismantling of the last barriers between art object and viewer ... (more)

First published on June 25, 2013 by Artcritical.com
Currently gracing the walls of the New York Studio School gallery are the paintings of two accomplished mid-career artists who both paint abstracted images inflected by elements of the real. Their philosophies of ... (more)

First published on June 12, 2013 by CityArts.info
Painting can be a sign, a concept, or documentation. In the postmodern age, it can be a comment about painting itself. Of course, it can even be a likeness – and this may be the most challenging of all because of the ... (more)

July 3, 2013
Museum-goers seeking examples of exuberant style, and its influence on our own tastes, will find the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” an unadulterated delight. Exquisite garments ... (more)

First published on Aug 20, 2013 by CityArts.info
Among the first works in Llyn Foulkes’ current retrospective at the New Museum is a video of the artist/musician singing and playing his “Machine,” a home-built contraption of car horns, cow bells ... (more)

March 22, 2013
One can think of all manner of ways that a painting can instantly catch the eye: quirky imagery, spell-binding technique, stylistical flamboyance, off-the-wall concepts, evocative mixtures of media, and so on.... (more)

February 18, 2013
Today, when a painter revisits the work of the masters, it’s liable to be with a wink and a nod. This is the postmodernist era, after all, and many artists today are less interested in revitalizing traditional ... (more)

First published on Jan 26, 2013 by Artcritical.com
The abstract collages in Mario Naves’ previous shows at Elizabeth Harris spoke eloquently of a particular approach to image-making, one involving a mixture of the tactical and the serendipitous. Constructed of painted ... (more)

First published on Dec 26, 2012 by Artcritical.com
At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was presented with a paint box by his mother. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed his life—and also the course of art. Picasso may ... (more)

January 7, 2013
Imagine the kinetic jazziness of Stuart Davis, blended with the dry, meticulous wit of René Magritte, and you might come up with something like the paintings of Trevor Winkfield. The artist’s sixteen paintings... (more)

December 10, 2012
In the early 80s, Simon Carr, Mark LaRiviere and Thaddeus Radell all attended graduate school at the Parsons School of Design, in those years a Mecca for artists interested in rigorous, painterly ... (more)

December 10, 2012
Art is artifice, and the paintings of Rackstraw Downes are no exception. But they do present a unique form of artifice. Neither Photorealist nor traditional, his landscapes and cityscapes occupy a realm ... (more)

November 20, 2012
Over the years, Susan Walp has finely honed her signature motif: a small, square still life, centered by a luminously rendered vessel or fruit that, icon-like, entices the viewer into its depths. Her renderings are ... (more)

November 22, 2012
In the modern age, Realism comes in every flavor from Magic Realism to Photorealism. Perhaps the most popular notion of realism of all, globally, is a kind of svelte Impressionism affording a poetic interpretation ... (more)

First published Aug 1, 2012 by CityArts.com
What kind of Pop artist “does battle at the border of life and death”? Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who so described her art-making in 1961, suggests a Japanese Andy Warhol in terms of sheer energy, protean... (more)