Galleries/Gallery Beat
Singular Journeys: Rosenthal’s transcendental landscapes
With her current show at Bowery Gallery, Deborah Rosenthal continues to infuse a highly personal approach with intimations of the mythic. Stylistically, the artist’s abstracted paintings have always recalled for me Robert Delaunay in their melodic, organic overlapping of planes of vivid color. (As a fellow Bowery Gallery artist, I’ve had the opportunity of observing...
Spotland
Journey through Hirst’s dotty past Damien Hirst is tapping into a simple fact: We all like smooth surfaces and bright colors. Since 1986, the bad boy British artist, notorious for his installations of floating animals in cases of formaldehyde, has produced about 1,500 spot paintings, white canvases covered in colorful circles. (He has an army...
Mechanical Garden
Pollack’s error makes art Carrie Pollack is a poet of impermanence. Her subject is memory and the visual echoes that surround us everywhere. On daily walks with her camera, she records deteriorating poster debris, the sky at a particular moment—the usual stuff to which we ordinarily pay little attention—then subjects the imagery to computer processing...
Traditions of Newness
Gordon Moore put in context Where would postmodernism be without paradoxes of context? After all, even works as dissimilar as Jasper Johns’ flag and Jeff Koons’ chrome bunny both recontextualize the familiar to challenge our perceptions of them. At Betty Cuningham, Gordon Moore’s exhibition of abstracted paintings and photo-emulsion drawings poses similar questions about processes...
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...
From Id to Paper: Dubuffet intros art brut
The year starts off with quite a bang at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. The current exhibition, Dubuffet and the Art Brut, is a museum-quality exploration of Jean Dubuffet, as well as the circle of artists that he admired and in some cases collected. Undoubtedly these had a profound effect on Dubuffet’s own artistic development. The connections made...
Art Crawl 2012 Kicks Off Feb. 4
This Saturday, Feb. 4, join ARTLOG for the first Art Crawl of 2012. Beginning at 3 p.m. at The New Museum, 235 Bowery, the fifth annual event (presented in partnership with Thrillist, The New Museum, Columbia University Alumni and The Appraisers Association) will celebrate the Lower East Side’s leading galleries from 3–7 p.m., concluding with...
Pay Dirt and Pigment: Theresa Byrnes mines the human condition
In her manifesto for Dust to Dust, Lower East Side artist Theresa Byrnes states: “I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold—I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not afraid of the rare disorder of the nervous system I have (Friedreich’s Ataxia). Because of FA I ride a...
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...
Lawton’s Curve Ball
Artist Reflects on City Visions “Curved Reality” is an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Pamela Lawton. It is an unusual show of New York City vistas that takes the urban architecture culture of New York and creates a painterly visual experience. Lawton’s work uses form and color to depict a reality that is...
Machiel Botman’s Mysteries: Depth and Beauty in Monochrome
The Dutch photographer Machiel Botman has a distinctly personal vision, choosing subjects for his exquisite black-and-white photographs that touch him emotionally. Superficially, it’s impossible to discern a unifying theme or figure out what drew him to the scenes or people he commemorates. Each image resembles a self-contained theatrical event, with its own distinctive drama and...
Broad-Brimmed Art: Bob Thompson revived
Painter Bob Thompson (1937–1966) straddled several artistic worlds. From Old-Master Europe, to hipster 1950s Provincetown, to the Beat poetry and bebop jazz scene of New York City, he was there, absorbing all that he could of these seemingly disparate universes. His artistic mentors and friends ranged from Red Grooms and Lester Johnson to LeRoi Jones...
Think Pink
A Ferocious Graffiti Evolution Who said women couldn’t create rambunctious graffiti art? Certainly not anyone who has seen Lady Pink’s exotic, brilliantly colored outpourings on view in “Evolution” at Woodward Gallery. Active since she was a 15-year-old student at New York’s High School of Art and Design, Ecuadorian-born Sandra Fabara, aka Lady Pink, first gained...
Elements of Art
Cézanne’s Wine Bottles Part 3 In the third version of Cézanne’s “The Card Players” series, the one now on view at the Musée d’Orsay, human figures enter the world that formerly belonged solely to the inanimate objects of drinking and eating. But in this version of genre painting, Cézanne once again gives primacy to the...
Enraptured by Nature: William Christine: New Paintings
William Christine’s paintings may not flirt with the cutting edge, but his landscapes at Prince Street Gallery impress for their sturdy pursuit of nature’s exuberance. Despite their brisk, brushy attack, simplified forms and vivid hues, his two dozen oil paintings and watercolors suggest an expressionism freed from any sort of indulgence, as if the artist...
Getting Medieval
Panel paintings at Feigen Late medieval imagination was joined to sacred purpose in every aspect of daily life. At the close of the Middle Ages, devotion itself was an art, one that lent gravity to all the other arts and shaped the tenor of living. Art was intended to ornament fleeting existence with symbols and...
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...
Secrets and Art: Neo Rauch’s Narrative Enigmas
I have long been fascinated by the work of the German artist Neo Rauch. From his strange, strained color palette to the scenes of modern dislocation that spill forth from his mind, he is consistently one of the most interesting contemporary painters in Europe or the U.S. His current show at David Zwirner Gallery shows...
Elements of Art
Cézanne’s wine bottles (Part 2 of 3) Almost 100 years ago, Paul Cézanne painted “Blue Pot and Bottle of Wine,” now on view in the collection at The Pierpont Morgan Library. Though oil on canvas, it has the hurried tentativeness of a sketch. The longer you stare at it, taking note of its incompleteness, it...
Rauschenberg’s Delights
An artist shows off his collection One of the most fun things an art lover can experience is a glimpse into the private collection of a beloved artist. The current exhibition at Gagosian uptown featuring Robert Rauschenberg’s private collection leaves one giddy with delight and reeling from the sheer volume and quality of collected work....
Alienated Yet Alluring
Lauder selects and collects Euro classics Frequenters of the Neue Galerie know what to expect from this jewel-like museum on 86th Street: fine and decorative art from Germany and Austria and a highly elegant café to boot. At the moment, however, visitors will find a somewhat different installation celebrating the museum’s 10th anniversary. Until April...
