Milton Resnick Was an AbEx Pioneer
A late starter or a painter ahead of his time? An earnest also-ran or a prickly, enigmatic genius? Too sensual or too hermetic? Milton Resnick was a first-generation abstract expressionist fated in...
View ArticleCatherine Murphy, Sneaking Glimpses of the Perceived World
Catherine Murphy's first show with Knoedler & Company finds the veteran realist at her most compelling, though as ever her work is compellingly odd rather than compellingly beautiful. She is a...
View ArticleHunt Slonem's Birds of a Feather Flocking Together
Marlborough Chelsea's second-floor premises in the new Chelsea Arts Tower, a gallery condominium building on West 25th Street, is an elegant space that cries out for subtle installations. That Hunt...
View ArticleElizabeth Cooper and Angela Fraleigh, Masters of Chance
Sometimes, artists look as if they are having such fun with paint that the sheer hedonism of their facture can be infectious. Such is the case with the painterly splurges, splatterings, and pourings...
View ArticleBack to the Future
New York will have a "back to the future" feel starting next week, thanks to the opening of the Whitney Museum's eagerly awaited exhibition, "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe." As if to...
View ArticleThe Erotic, the Political, and the Personal
The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor...
View ArticlePhillip Pearlstein, Objectifying the Nude
Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost...
View ArticleThe Location of the Second Generation
Only a philistine could think that something as complex and nuanced as artistic success could be explained along the lines of the real estate mantra "location, location, location." And yet, there is no...
View ArticleSmears, Scribbles, and Scratches: Twombly at the Tate Modern
The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London's Tate Modern is a reminder that, above all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, with its...
View ArticleShh. Hammershøi Is on Display
Whenever there is an exhibition of the Symbolist painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, his quietude is invoked. When he was shown at the Guggenheim in New York 10 years ago, partly through the efforts of the...
View ArticleHopper Cityscapes, Prior to the Paint
As this gem of an exhibition on the Upper East Side demonstrates, Edward Hopper found himself in etching. For the first 18 years of his career, unable to support himself by painting, Hopper was obliged...
View ArticleBritish Modernism's 'Triple Threat'
LONDON Wyndham Lewis was the "triple threat" of British Modernism: He was accomplished and innovative as the writer of linguistically dazzling satires such as "The Apes of God" and "Tarr." He was...
View ArticleLocating Propriety in the Inappropriate
There is something appropriate in finding Zach Feuer Gallery open for business in mid-August with a Phoebe Washburn installation, when the rest of Chelsea is a ghost town. Seeing this Dadaistic riff on...
View ArticleTrevor Winkfield, the Conceptual Collagist
Trevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of John Ashbery's collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally...
View ArticleBits and Pieces Brought Together: Ashbery and Naves
Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry, in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the inventors of...
View ArticleRobert Bordo, the Heady Hedonist
In the title for his 2007 Venice Biennale, critic and curator Robert Storr exhorted the art world to "think with the senses, feel with the mind." One artist who has already staked a claim to what could...
View ArticlePainting's Post-Feminist Form & Sculpture's Matron Saint
A striking feature of the roster of shows on offer this season in New York's commercial galleries and nonprofit spaces is the strength of sculpture and sculptural installation. First up is a two-person...
View ArticleFrozen Instants of Failure
Diana Al-Hadid's menacing, heavily worked, baroque structures take arrested hubris as their theme. In three large sculptures, powerful in impact and ambition alike, a wall installation, and supporting...
View ArticleThe Conceptual Provocateur: Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is an art-world provocateur whose practice takes the central problem of conceptual art and runs wild with it. Conceptual art can mean different things, but whether seen historically...
View ArticleReading Between the Linens: Cecily Brown at Gagosian Gallery
A visitor to a Cecily Brown exhibition must think of him- or herself as a camera. Contemplating one picture at a time is the default mode. Seeing the show in a single take is the wide-angle view. And...
View ArticleEngineering Optimism
By the time Stalin coined the phrase engineer of the soul to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have...
View ArticleStart Your Engines
The streaming, fluttering cardinal red forms of Russell Roberts Talking Engines of Our Day #5, 2005, are at once redolent of flags and limbs. They are strident against a dense moiré of textured ground...
View ArticleAvigdor Arikha 1929-2010
The exquisite poise and quiet understatement of the work of Avigdor Arikha belies in style its passionate author, who died in Paris last week at 81. His paintings and pastels, infused with light and...
View ArticleChaste Yet Ravishing
Some think of Tel Aviv in relation to Israel as being like New York in America, the deliciously decadent heart of an otherwise puritanical land. Philip Pearlsteins lithograph of a model seated amidst...
View ArticleWintours Eyes
According to Alex Katz, speaking publicly at Londons National Portrait Gallery on Friday with Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky and the Gallerys director, Sandy Nairne, Americans size up someone...
View ArticleTunnel Vision
As the judiciously selected and stunningly installed exhibition at Tate Britain demonstrates, the 1930s were Henry Moores most fecund and innovative period of sculptural experimentation, confirming...
View ArticleTWISTER
It is little surprise that the debut art exhibition of septuagenarian poet John Giorno should be in your face. An inveterate experimenter with new formats for poetry performance, Giorno pioneered...
View ArticleTunnel of Discovery
British artist Christopher Cook's third solo show with Mary Ryan Gallery is titled "Concrete Firmament". His motif of freeway tunnels and his medium of liquid graphite on aluminum are exquisitely...
View ArticleBillboard Syncopations
James Hyde is a painter who can rarely contain himself within two dimensions. His semiotic explorations of the medium have taken him in the direction of paint filled Plexiglass vitrines that approach...
View ArticleOrgy in the Raw
Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator. In Le Tableau, a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition...
View ArticleMug Shot
Simon Gaon is a straight-up expressionist. He conveys rich, strong feelings about his surroundings, insisting on directness both of application and observation. New York born and trained, his style and...
View ArticleFounding Father
Our Independence Day image is a 1969 photograph by Bill Beckley (very proto-Cindy Sherman). A survey of Mr. Beckley's work, ranging from conceptual text and image polyptychs to sumptuously ethereal...
View ArticleBeach Beauty
Connie Fox, for thirty years and counting a year-round veteran of the legendary East Hampton art community, has been the subject of over sixty shows across a distinguished career, but is still what...
View ArticleThe world on his own terms
This is the summer for Rackstraw Downes. A trifecta of exhibitions to savor in the Tristate area include a survey of drawings on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery through July 30; Onsite Paintings,...
View ArticleModernism Under the Radar
One of the Hamptons quietestand classiestarts organizations is the Ayn Foundations Sagaponack, NY outpost. A chapel-like white cube within a barn across the road from a vineyard, the Ayn is a...
View ArticleWhen Exposure Required Composure
The great romantic sculptor enlisted a number of photographers not merely to document his oeuvre but to mythologize his creativity. American Edward Steichen rose to the challenge, employing chiaroscuro...
View ArticleSkyscraper Painting Amidst Exhibition Sprawl
Martha Diamond's 1994 painting, Black, White, Gray Cityscape #3, was last seen in New York at the artists 2004 retrospective survey at the New York Studio School, an exhibition I organized as gallery...
View ArticleA Life in Paint and Other Materials, Rosebuds For Instance
The veteran abstractionist Joan Snyder has been showing in New York since the early 1970s. Her latest show, at Betty Cuningham, recalls those early works in their painterly abundance. Ms. Snyder's show...
View ArticleAway Games
For his latest show at Lori Bookstein, John Dubrow has taken to painting in other artists' studios -- or at least to painting images of their studios -- as subjects have come to include artists in...
View ArticlePunchinello Hits the Gym
"Punchinello as Other" is Patrick Webb's fifth New York solo exhibition since 1993 to be devoted to imagined contemporary scenes involving characters from the Commedia dell'Arte. Also on view, in the...
View ArticleWrithing Forms
Annabeth Rosen is not just holder of the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis in name but truly in spirit as well, extending the legacy of the legendary Arneson in a quest...
View ArticleStreet Smarts
Most viewers of Rose Wylies show at Thomas Erben Gallery, titled WHAT with WHAT, would want to conclude that the rambunctious, street-smart brutalism on display there is the work of an inner city...
View ArticleSynchronicity at Columbia
Up at Columbias LeRoy Neiman Gallery MFA student Nora Griffin well-known already downtown and before her enrollment as a writer on the Brooklyn Rail and an exhibiting artist has organized and is...
View ArticleA Remarkable Posthumous Debut
The final, short gallery-going week of the year is also New Yorks last chance to catch a remarkable posthumous debut. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, an artist who spent a long lifetime operating under...
View ArticleYou Will Meet A Tall, Handsome Stranger On The Bowery
Think Bowery and it is either the New Museum or the Bowery Mission that likely springs to mind. But right now it is also the place to view something whose rarity and finesse belies both associations: a...
View ArticleCrockery Heaven
If the souls of crockery and tchochkes are destined for divine judgement then a well-behaved tea platter, ornament or china centerpiece equivalent of dying and going to heaven would be to end up in a...
View ArticleA Beauty By Beckmann Stands Out Amidst The Throng
On view at Chowaiki & Co, Pier 92, Booth 246. The Armory Show takes place in two piers on the Hudson; Pier 92 hosts Modern, Pier 94 Contemporary, with over 200 galleries between them. The Armory...
View ArticleSeparating the Goats from the Sheep
Brooklyns Fort Greene Park has a group of new sculptures at its north-east entrance plaza. The two goats and a deer, works by young Scottish artist Ruth McKerrell (born 1983), inaugurate a significant...
View ArticleSin City Goes Tea Total
Readers of The New York Sun can be forgiven for assuming that a lead story here on a tea convention in Las Vegas must be Tea Party-related. Did Sarah Palin play the slots? you might be wondering. But...
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