Author Archive
Animal Kingdom
Anne Arnold Humanizes the Wild The sculptures of Anne Arnold, on display at Alexandre Gallery, are so masterful—so pointed and witty, economically configured and nuanced—that you can’t help but wonder: Why has it been 24 years since this artist was last graced with a solo exhibition? Read the accompanying catalogue Anne Arnold: Sculpture from Four...
Vuillard Confidential
Master of Intimism Gets Intense Long gone, I hope, are the days when the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was pooh-poohed as being insufficiently radical or, if you prefer, overly bourgeois—as if art steeped in domesticity and comfort somehow precluded pictorial innovation. If Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, an exhibition at the...
How Odd is Odd—and Francesca?
Fresh views of Nerdrum and Woodman A nagging question surrounding the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, on display at Forum Gallery, is: Can you still paint like that? “Like that,” as if the past 400 years of Western art hadn’t transpired; to put brush to canvas, without irony or affectation, in the style of Rembrandt and...
Petty, Humane and Perfect
Sherman, Rembrandt and Degas in portrait What would art be without fiction—that is to say, without the allusive sweep of metaphor? Literature, music, painting, poetry, dance, film—you name it, every medium thrives when it embodies something beyond its material means. “Art that conceals art” is old news, of course, but that’s not to say it...
The Blur of Modernism: From Japan to Sarah Sze
The advent and subsequent triumph of modernism did much to diminish the role of narrative in the visual arts, insisting, as it did, that the exigencies of craft should take precedence over anything smacking of literature. But modernism is an historical blip—a significant blip, mind you, but a blip all the same. Narratives have dominated...
Lovely Challenges
Buchwald and Lenaghan go for clarity The paintings of Howard Buchwald, on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are as much a call to arms as an exhibition of art. Listen to Buchwald tell it: “Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to and independent of the...
Two Masters
Turning on to Leaf and Dickinson The Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in postmodernism—as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs...
Ripeness and Vision
Evans in check, Matta forever Maybe it’s the season and the dropping temperatures. Maybe it’s Sideshow Gallery and the haimish atmosphere it cultivates. But mostly it’s the paintings of Tom Evans. How else to explain the wave of heat radiating from far-off Williamsburg? Far-off? Williamsburg is a quick jaunt on the L train. No, we’re...
Describing Profundity in Art
Bigbee astounds, Ashbery floats What I know about poetry I know from my poet friends, and what they say about the poet John Ashbery is never less than fond and often more than querulous. Ashbery, a self-described “harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of surrealism,” seems to share this equivocal...
Pioneers in Shadows
Scaling Braque and Takenaga The paintings of Barbara Takenaga, on display at DC Moore Gallery, are easy to admire and hard to love. Straddled between these polarities is Takenaga herself, an artist cruising on pictorial stratagems and touched by personal tragedy. The relationship between the two curbs our judgment of the work. Immaculately contrived and...
Painting Silly and Smart
Take the Jansons and Chisholm challenge You’d be hard-pressed to find paintings sillier than those of Max Jansons, whose recent work is on display at James Graham & Sons. Saying so isn’t panning the pictures, and not panning the pictures isn’t damning them with faint praise. Freewheelin’ is the exhibition’s title and theme: Jansons’ amalgams...
The Gadfly and the Virtuoso
Munk and Schwartz spark the galleries New Yorkers who make a fetish of artistic technique—of traditional verities adroitly set into place—should make a beeline for Babcock Galleries to view a handful of diminutive paintings-on-paper by Robert Schwartz (1947–2000).
Kirk Stoller: On Point
Any genre of art has its own set of rewards, pitfalls and clichés. The tradition of the found object can seem especially prone to the latter. The challenge of recycling ephemera is in overcoming (or thwarting) a readymade veneer of history. Too many artists coast on the romance of the found object, milking its surface...
Li Songsong
Contemporary art doesn’t come more soulless than the paintings of the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, who is having his American debut at Pace Gallery. OK, that might be a stretch. The competition is, after all, pretty stiff. Songsong isn’t any less professional—that is to say slick and superficial—than any number of artists whose names you...
Sigmar Polke: Photoworks 1964-2000
This exhibition at Leo Koenig Inc. does no favors to either the oeuvre or the memory of the German painter Sigmar Polke, who died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 69. Who it favors is hard to say—certainly not the viewer or, at least, a viewer with only a cursory idea of Polke’s...
Reverie
Is it just me or is there something a bit untoward about a curator who includes his own work in an exhibition he’s put together?
ZAP: Masters of Psychedelic Art 1965-1974
This exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery is reminiscent of nothing so much as Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak, a show mounted by The Jewish Museum in 2005. What do the author and illustrator of venerable children’s books like Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen have in common with the...
Al Souza: [sic]
The best Gerhard Richter painting extant isn’t by Gerhard Richter. It’s not even a painting—or, rather, it’s mostly not a painting. It’s a collage by Al Souza, whose recent work is at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.
70 Years of Abstract Painting: Excerpts
Excerpts is the subtitle to 70 Years of Abstract Painting, an exhibition of 40-some artists at Jason McCoy Gallery. As such, it serves as a convenient hedge against complaints about the patchwork selection of works on view. As an organizing conceit, Excerpts beats Hodgepodge or Airing Out The Storage Racks, both of which are closer...
Pink Moon
Some touchstones are more esoteric than others. By portending an intimacy that can be shared by thousands (if not millions) and still seem like a secret treasure, they amass cult appeal. Given the fragmented nature of contemporary society, there are any number of passionately held artifacts that remain outside the purview of mass culture. Pink...
