Tag: Peter Halley

Solo Shows

Eric Hibit: The constant gardener 

Contributed by Zach Seeger / Dennis Congdon, whose paintings depict acrid colored heaps of art garbage, once told me, “I tend to appreciate painters who work economically with what they’re given from their surroundings. You know, like my grandmother, who lived on a farm, and would whip up a meal with practically nothing in the fridge.” I too was raised to appreciate this beauty-through-austerity approach, and in light of tariffs and stagnating sales, painting with economy and valuing actual pigment may not just be in fashion but necessary. “The Big Seed,” Eric Hibit’s painting show at Morgan Lehman, is a tribute to physical pigment and the conservationist spirit, and a showcase for acute observational detail and the sheer joy of painting. 

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Museum Exhibitions

What makes a good painting?

Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.

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Solo Shows

Peter Halley: On the cusp

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Halley’s catalogue raisonné needs to be updated. This month, a group of his paintings from 1980 and 1981 are on display in a gratifyingly revelatory two-gallery collaboration between Craig Starr on the Upper East Side and Karma in the East Village. Most of the paintings have rarely been shown, a few never, and I was delighted to see them, however belatedly.

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Solo Shows

Peter Halley: The new unreality

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In his first solo show at Greene Naftali, Peter Halley contends with the new American reality of an increasingly shameless and authoritarian state under which, despite the best efforts of an overstretched free press and an embattled political opposition, the difference between fact and fiction has become increasingly obscured. Halley has outfitted the cavernous gallery with metallic floor-to-ceiling digital prints, tweaked lighting, a handful of his signature paintings, and intermittent sound emissions to create a disturbing sense of unease and “topsy-turvy disorientation. In the back room, as a mordant coda, Halley has included one of Robert Morris’s 1978 sculptures made of classical architectural fragments and a distorting fun house mirror.

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