Tag: Patrick Neal

Solo Shows

Unskilled Worker: About a boy and more

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Upon entering Daniel Cooney Fine Art, one is immediately surrounded by a colorful crowd of idiosyncratic boys. As portrait subjects, they feel oddly familiar and distinctive, and their haunting visages might stop you in your tracks. With deep, rich colors the portraits radiate a warm glow, each subject is suffused with a stained-glass brilliance and idealized in an almost spiritual aura. The paintings are the work of London-based Helen Downie, who goes by the moniker Unskilled Worker – a tongue-in-cheek reference to her self-taught background….

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Gallery shows

Contemporary landscape: Reinvigorated and reinvented

Contributed by Patrick Neal / In New York City galleries, portraits, still lifes, interiors, and landscapes are everywhere, reinvigorated for the twenty-first century. With landscape painting in particular, innovation often arises through a seamless compounding of sources, where past and present, universal and specific, coexist. Three exemplary solo shows drive home the point. With varying degrees of naturalism and mediation, all three artists favor an authentic response to nature, and the titles of each exhibition suggest a phenomenological grounding.

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Solo Shows

Lee Maxey: Teasing out the uneasy

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Many years ago, I saw a strange and seductive specter on a cold winter night in Troy, New York, that has haunted me to this day. Through the glass windows of a gloomily defunct department store, a neon shock of orange letters hovered in the air spelling out the word EXIST. This enigma was the work of the artist Sharon Bates, part of an installation in which she cleverly riffed on the authority of an EXIT sign, transforming an everyday sight into a glowing spiritual command. I was reminded of Bates’s sculpture while taking in Lee Maxey’s new exhibition of paintings, titled “Wait Here,” at Olympia.

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Studio Visit

Twofer: Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger

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.

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Solo Shows

Elizabeth Hazan: Playful visionary

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Elizabeth Hazan’s exhilarating oil paintings, on view at Hesse Flatow gallery in Chelsea, marry old-school color field abstraction and loopy, gestural shorthand. Her medium-sized and large-scale canvasses fluctuate between recognizable landscape formations and patchworks of chromatic passages. In a style that is seriously playful, elemental motifs like trees and lakes are rendered as simple squiggles and glyphs straddling blocks of heightened color combinations. The paintings feel worked but never labored, and unleash the uniquely expressive power of color, line, and scale.

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Solo Shows

Seth Becker’s virtuoso weirdness

Contributed by Patrick Neal / There is a particular kind of thrill in trying to understand what is going on in Seth Becker’s paintings that involves separating what’s strange from what’s familiar. The subjects of his small oil paintings are peculiar, and so are the lenses through which he approaches a person, place, or thing. His solo show “Field Music” currently on view at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY, occupying two floors and comprising around 40 small-scale oil paintings, embodies the painter’s slow-burn perversity.

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Solo Shows

Michael Aaron Lee: The frame is the subject

Contributed by Patrick Neal / The spacious new apartment gallery Nightshift in Crown Heights is in a charming pre-war brownstone. Hardwood floors with Celtic knot patterns, elegant banisters, inlaid lights, and period furniture appear to be complemented by attractive silver and gold metalworks that straddle the walls. Closer inspection reveals that these glistening low-relief wallworks are made of paper coated with graphite and metallic gouache. The illusion of metal is particularly radiant from different points in the entryway, where the shiny exterior textures of each piece capture the sunlight and warm colors of the surrounding room. These paper sculptures, along with drawings and collages, comprise Michael Aaron Lee’s “A Frame is a Line,” his inaugural solo show for the gallery. 

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Solo Shows

Stephen Maine’s hands-off abstraction

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Stephen Maine’s abstract paintings, on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, hit you head-on with their optically charged surfaces and imposing presence. The gallery, which has a penchant for showing large-scale work, is exhibiting in its main space several of Maine’s signature “residue paintings” – spongy, all-over compositions with gorgeous, saturated colors in acrylic on canvas – that are over eight feet by six feet.

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Solo Shows

Gary Petersen’s Populuxe abstraction

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Full of bright and brimming lines and shapes, jumbled with quirky geometric forms and zippy colors, Gary Petersen’s paintings are giddy and uplifting. They bring to mind all manner of fun – vacation, travel, cartoons, toys, television, Creamsicles, candies, fruit slices and braided rag rugs, the flamboyant bills of toucans and pelicans. More deeply, his large abstract paintings exude a retro, utopian vibe that marries the hard-edge abstraction of late modernism with some of the quirkier strains of twentieth-century design.

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Solo Shows

Alyssa Klauer’s queer phantasmagoria

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Is the detectable hand of the artist evidence of a unique creator, or is gesture mainly indicative of earlier painters touches, the ghosts of art history? More broadly, do we choose the course of our own lives or are they predestined? These thoughts about individual sensibility and personal agency occurred to me while viewing Alyssa Klauers fine, visually and intellectually energized solo show Dare Me, on view at Olympia on the Lower East Side.

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Catalogue Essays

Alyssa Fanning: Ravishing Devastations

Contributed by Patrick Neal / When I first saw the artist Alyssa Fannings linoleum prints and oil paintings depicting demolition and littered industrial sites around her neighborhood close to New Jerseys Van Buskirk Island and the Hackensack River, they immediately brought to mind the empty lots and urban decay bordering my own neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens.

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