An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Daniel Giordano: Yura, I want to play a game of me spitting out a question and you rattling off an answer. A real Martin Kippenberger special of a “first thought, best thought” type response to keep us on our toes… Okay, so here we go: What artists do you steal from most and what bag of tricks did you whip out to aid in the making of your installation at Olympia?
Recently, Adam Simon visited his longtime friend Cathy Nan Quinlan at her Bed-Stuy studio to see the latest paintings, inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term (1632–1633), which hangs in London’s National Gallery. During the visit, they talked about The Temporary Museum, the Talking Pictures blog, and the salons Cathy has hosted in her home.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / In “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” in the December issue of Harper’s, Dean Kissick presents a provocative critique, arguing that since the 1990s art’s politicized expressions of discomfort have diminished its quality and impact. As a remedy, he calls for artists to return to romantic ideals of beauty, strangeness, and emotion. He contends that artists should prioritize innovation and aesthetic rigor while focusing on universal human experience rather than political correctness. While his case is compelling on the surface, Kissick overlooks crucial historical and economic factors that have affected the art world. The shift in art’s focus is a result of not only political engagement but also a complex interplay of post-industrial social, economic, and cultural forces that emerged in the 1960s and have led to changes in how art is created, valued, and consumed.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access…
Contributed by Mark Wethli / As I viewed Dan Dowd’s intimate and poetic work, now at Magenta Plains, I considered our inclination to cathect feelings and memories onto objects. Clothing in particular echoes the shapes of our bodies; touches them; connotes gender, time, and economic status; and absorbs everything from our scent to our DNA. Dowd creates small, iconic assemblages out of found materials, including fragments of inner tubes, clothing, rags, and home décor.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings; at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhardt Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantai and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frieze (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different for consideration here. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden all who seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad, as such Hantai and Frize are part of another genealogy.
Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / “I vehemently reject the claim that mark making by itself harbors any potential.” This was Isabelle Graw in conversation in 2010 with Achim Hochdörfer. The previous year, the latter had published his essay, “A Hidden Reserve”, chronicling a persistent but transformed and inquisitive use of the gesture by artists such as Joan Snyder and Simon Hantaï, after the myth of its unrestricted access to the inner self had been thoroughly critiqued by virtue of the encaustic and enamel regimentations of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. It is not certain, however, whether mark-making can ever be “by itself,” as Graw puts it. Certainly, it carries with it endless associations and ever-shifting positions. Upon her first encounter with Abstract Expressionism, a young Louise Fishman saw in it a queer language suitable to her own alienation, in contradiction to its macho orthodoxy, while Amy Sillman similarly emphasizes painting’s potential to transgress categories. Hochdörfer’s corollary thesis, relevant to this day, is the dialectic between “literalism and transcendence,” or the acknowledgement of art’s concrete materiality versus the expectation and oft-reported experience of transformation, metaphor, or perceptual intensification.
At artnet, Donald Kuspit suggests that Johns is a good avant-garde conformist, and that his gray is evocative of the “man in the gray flannel […]
“Jasper Johns: Gray,” curated by James Rondeau and Douglas Druick at The Art Institute of Chicago. Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY. February 5 – May […]
Read more.“THE COLOR LINE,” Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY. Through Aug. 3. Holland Cotter: “The artist Odili Donald Odita shaped this group exhibition around, […]
