An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / In the early 2000s, among the pines and solace of an artist residency, Polly Apfelbaum shared with me a small, well-thumbed through book. Right off the bat I took the isolated black-and-white image on its cover to possess talismanic powers. Such was my introduction to the work of Myron Stout.
Contributed by Jeffrey Grunthaner / Properly curated, summer group exhibitions can open novel avenues between disparate artists and particular creative practices. “Made in Cologne,” currently up at Peter Freeman, Inc., decidedly accomplishes this. The conceit of the show is simple: the 15 featured artists have all made ceramic works at the atelier of Niels Dietrich in Cologne, Germany. Founded in 1984, Dietrich’s studio specializes in ceramics and showcases how plastic this medium can be. The expressive character of the exhibition derives in part from the variety of styles and attitudes on display. But all embrace the unique nature of ceramics in one way or the other.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.
Contributed by Barbara A. MacAdam / In his solo show “Shiner” at Peter Freeman, Inc., Charles LeDray continues to frolic in his own past, fixing memories and cultural landmarks in tightly condensed, shrunken garments sewn up and assembled into sculptures, and in self-constructed objects turned on a potter’s wheel. He thus creates a home in which he is master and exercises total control over how the artifacts of his life are perceived. He draws our attention to miniscule objects, thereby empowering them. Welcome, then, to a Lilliputian jamboree, in which little people are at once quarries and intriguers.
