An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle….
In this thoughtful exchange, artist Erin Lawlor talks to Diana Copperwhite about the role of intuition and emotion in their work, their love of music, and their mutual interest in painter Howard Hodgkin. Copperwhite’s paintings will be on view alongside Hodgkin’s work at the Auckland Art Fair from May 1-4, and Lawlor ‘s solo “Divining” opens at the Highlanes Municipal Gallery in Ireland on April 26.
Contributed by John Goodrich / Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Looking back at the early decades of modernism, we may sense something inevitable about the ascent of Picasso and Matisse. Weren’t both driven, gifted artists poised to take advantage of their cultural moment? And wasn’t the time ripe for Matisse’s upending of expectations of color, and Picasso’s overturning of pictorial structures? Of course, life is not so tidy and linear for the artists operating in the moment. As the luminous exhibition “Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde” at NYU’s Grey Art Museum demonstrates, none of the early modernists had a monopoly on talent or a singularly dominant vision of what painting had to be.
Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.
Contributed by Gwenaël Kerlidou / Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, is one of the first fictionalized accounts of the ravages of European colonialism in Africa. Marlow, the narrator, while surveying the grounds of an ivory collecting station on the Congo River, catches sight of a row of shriveled heads mounted on stakes. The episode segues to a deeper exploration of the psyche of Kurtz, a terminally ill but very successful ivory harvester working for the king of Belgium. His cryptic last words – “the horror, the horror” – sum up the situation. The title and content of Conrad’s novella reverberates through Carol Bruns’s current exhibition at White Columns of mostly monochromatic frontal sculptures, in which the human figure is omnipresent, either as hieratic totems or as ritual masks. Scattered in the gallery space, an unruly mob of chimeras and other nightmarish characters seems to be stoically harboring the scars, wrinkles, creases, and other traces of immemorable sufferings.
