An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Jacqueline Gourevitch’s resilience stems from restraint and slow observation. From her first solo exhibition in 1958 to the current striking survey of 21 cloud paintings dating from 1965–2018 at Storage Gallery in Tribeca, the nonagenarian has shown that sustained attention to a single subject can yield infinite and dynamic variations.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Some 250 years after the birth of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the Yale Center for British Art has re-opened its renovated Brutalist building with a perfectly scaled, carefully curated exhibition of 77 Turner prints, watercolors, and oil paintings from its collection of his works, the largest outside Britain.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / In two shows at Bookstein Projects, excess and essence complement one other from opposite ends of simplicity. Janice Redman’s “Rough Alchemy” in the side gallery presents mostly small, hand wrought sculptures that project vulnerability, earnestly offering themselves in all their imperfections to our subjective examination. In the main gallery, Diana Horowitz’s “Light is a Place” highlights objectivity in landscape paintings that broadcast optical truth from across the room despite their tiny size. In portraying distance, they keep their own, reticently holding the walls.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / “The Soul of Nature”at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of many exhibitions dedicated to German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) on the 250th anniversary of his death. Some of his finest are absent – the epic Sea of Ice’s vision of an arctic shipwreck, The Great Enclosure’s resonant view of a Dresden field Napoleon amassed his troops on, or Ruine Eldena, one of Friedrich’s many depictions of the remnants of the powerful Catholic monastery his hometown Griefswald formed around. But there are numerous studies displaying his keen observation of nature, research he used for paintings creatively orchestrated in the studio.
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 Margaret McCann / Elizabeth Flood’s landscapes in “Lookout” at Storage Gallery included oil paintings that emphasize realism and expressionistic ink drawings. The latter express vigorous engagement with the outdoors. Gettysburg (Pickett’s Charge, October 9) channels the drama of that day. Stirring energy like that of George Nick’s alla prima work drives the eye deep into a field under a sensational sky. Conversely, mental distance accompanies Flood’s large polyptychs, whose combinations resemble photographic contact sheets, art website layouts, or bulletin board accruals. At their best, artifice is imbued with the existential doubt of Edwin Dickinson or Giacometti. Repetition and variance become metaphors for modern contingency and ambivalence. Multiple views rouse a mix of ennui, curiosity, taste, and choice, like that fueling our daily shuffle through cyberspace.
Contributed by Matt Phillips / Dana Frankfort’s exhibition “Life and Death” at Olympia presents eleven paintings that are by turns blunt and strikingly sensitive.These new works juxtapose the written word with gestural abstraction, the two languages simultaneously contradicting and supporting one another. Some paintings have legible text while in others the letters are all but gone, leaving the viewer to contemplate space where words have once been. The works are disparate, but each reaches toward a cohesive resolution.
