An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whitney Claflin’s work, now on view in her solo exhibition “Pinky’s Where” at Derosia, is winningly deceptive, like the title’s double-entendre. Consider the paintings Emma in Tarzana and Mr. Triste. At first blush, they seem nonchalantly wise-ass and a little frustrating, the first an offhand quip about internet celebrity and influencer supreme Emma Chamberlain, and the second…
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Brooklyn-based conceptual painter Adam Simon is known for his cagey synthesis of the graphic symbols and tropes of commerce and civic life into elegant visual statements about the zeitgeist and, more grandly, the world as a whole. He can use text to penetrating effect, as in the small paintings he made a few years ago superimposing the edict “STEAL THIS ART” on the vintage silhouette of a policeman. In one not-quite-Hoffman-esque line and an evocative image, he captured the ambivalence and limbo of the art world between the establishment and the counterculture, having himself cultivated a live community in that space by organizing, with several other artists, the collaborative “Four Walls” events in Hoboken in the 1980s and Williamsburg in the 1990s. In “Great Figures,” his solo show now up at Osmos, he has continued in a searchingly ironic vein, now with a bemused fretfulness that affords it epochal resonance.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Burgeoning technological innovation over generations has brought out the millennial optimist in many, but, especially outside the bubble of the tendentious capitalists eager to cash in on their investments, it may have unloosed the Luddite paranoiac in more. “Goings On,” a pastiche of Mark Fingerhut’s cheerfully invasive videos deftly curated by Lonesome Dove and recently screened at Springs Projects in Dumbo, speaks to both – the one in knowing condescension, the other in sardonic affirmation. Blasts of images that rankle sometimes owing to their content, sometimes because of their staccato presentation and creepily fluid mutability, make a case for the digital matrix’s weird agency and, beyond that, its insidious seductiveness.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Out of the Blue” at Frosch & Co boasts a tight concept and adds real snap to the conversation presumed suspended until after Labor Day. The idea is to explore how the color blue ramifies through the lenses of different painters. That might seem like a merely modular survey, since other colors too have distinct connotations. But blue’s, as the gallery’s press statement notes, seem to swing more dramatically – between cool and warm, masculine and feminine, obscene and pure, barbaric and royal, stormy and serene. This quality makes for an unusually rich array.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A great asset of abstract art is its capacity to accommodate in a single picture phenomena that don’t readily fit together in real life and make some kind of sense out of them. There are as many ways to exploit that capacity as there are artists. In her solo show “Loggia” now on view at Helm Contemporary, comprising three large pieces and several smaller ones, Kim Uchiyama distills visual tropes of nature – water, shoreline, forest, desert, and more – into configurations of color that project an idealized but grounded spatial relationship between outside and inside, broadly construed. It’s a quietly ambitious agenda, and she is successful in no small part because her brand of geometric abstraction is so egalitarian: no single element seems more or less important than another.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The direct and unpretentious title of Brooklyn artist Catherine Haggarty’s solo show “Just Drawing,” now up at Geary in Millerton, NY, conveys modest intent: to record on paper the inertial power of everyday life without much prior conceptual mediation. Just draw it. Cats by turns prowling a pyramid and emulating sphynxes on a starry night feature in a couple of drawings, which are meticulous without being fussy, and two others unobtrusively reference Haggarty’s art practice. Together these works and others essay a day in a life grounded by a comforting pet, reveries of icons, an enduring vocation, a familiar room, and scrappy clothing – nothing inherently grand, perhaps, but nothing remotely dismissible, either.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Despite the still breathtaking majesty of the physical world, human machinations are undermining its habitability. The United States is more starkly and toxically divided than it has been since the Civil War, and some Americans claim, contra Woody Guthrie, that “This Land” – the title of Leslie Wayne’s cogent new exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery – was made only for them and not for other Americans. This existential double-whammy leaves artists with something of a conundrum: how to honor and present beauty robustly without seeming cluelessly disengaged. Wayne finds the sweet spot.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Several notable painters – Julie Heffernan, Jules de Balincourt, and Alexis Rockman, among them – have seized on the perils of climate change. In Jennifer Coates’s new solo show “Edge Effects,” jointly mounted at Chart Gallery and High Noon Gallery, she drills deeply into the subject and emerges with work that dazzles to engage, and vice-versa. The show’s title is an ecological term for what happens when one habitat impinges on another, which climate change is accelerating and amplifying. The phenomenon implies crowding, ergo potential conflict and trouble, and Coates’s canvases are appropriately busy and calculatedly unnerving. Bacchanal, a large painting, depicts the jangled co-location of lush plant life, bemused animals, and humans naked but often distressed. No doubt intentionally, it’s a far cry from Nicolas Poussin’s eponymous seventeenth-century study ingenuously celebrating sensuality. For Coates, the title sharply intimates collective hedonism gone awry. Touché.
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Hitting the road to Alabama for Sharon’s solo show “March” at the Sarah Moody Gallery at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in late March, we knew from ongoing contact with gallery director and art professor William Dooley and his assistant Vicki Rial that a deftly curated presentation in a beautiful space and a warm reception from the Art Department were in store. The students and gallery patrons who attended Sharon’s artist’s talk were inquisitive, smart, and welcoming. What we did not expect was the prevalence of so many talented people in the wider art community spanning Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, which we discovered is rich with deeply engaged artists, curators, and gallerists.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A striking feature of the paintings and works on paper of Janice Biala (1903–2000), now on view at Berry Campbell in a show craftily curated by Jason Andrew, is their seamless reconciliation of civilizational clutter and spatial order. Fixing that notion is the earliest painting, The Studio (1946), arraying the artist’s active workspace and establishing her intent to embrace the world through it. (Coincidentally, Vera Iliatova’s “The Drawing Room” at Nathalie Karg gamely recaptures and updates kindred impulses.) Biala’s work here, spanning the immediate postwar period almost to the end of the Cold War and blending the New York School and the School of Paris – she lived in both cities – also bears the considerable weight of twentieth-century history, art and otherwise, with extraordinary grace and weightless cohesion, free of the strain of obvious contrivance.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If the paintings in Mary Shah’s 2022 show “Dream Opera” suggested struggle from below against a resistant surface, her new ones in “Sunbird” – now on view at Rick Wester Fine Art and at least as impressive – declare liberation and ascent. Reinforcing this sense of breakthrough is a pronounced directionality, epitomized in Starlings (Jewel Street), whose arrow-like line zigs decisively to the left. The title presumably discloses Shah’s proximate visual inspiration. But, showcasing abstraction’s great virtue of allusiveness, which she is adept at harnessing, the painting’s imagery could also summon fish in the ocean, for instance, as well as birds in the sky.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon – the ballyhooed simultaneous release of Oppenheimer and Barbie, two expensive and well-acted films with sophisticated political messages rendered by leading auteurs – afforded 2023 the façade of audacity. But they came out during the writers’ strike, which signaled, if somewhat below the radar trained on the films, the uneasy and uncertain relationship between streaming and Hollywood.
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / I first encountered Nora Griffin’s paintings on a blisteringly hot Saturday in the summer of 2022. David Fierman had just opened his rakish subway-tiled space on Pike Square, and it was unfinished as well as uncooled (though not, of course, uncool). The paintings in “Liquid Days” harmonized all the moody vibes vectoring into and radiating out of that vortex of LES attitude and history, rendering a sweaty refuge a sublime interlude. Her compositions were frenetic, with marks, cognizable images, and found objects wafting like crowd-wise insects all about the canvas, sometimes spilling over its edges….
