An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by David Rhodes / Matthew Marks’s current exhibition of Martin Barré’s paintings coincides with New York exhibitions of two other French painters: Alix Le Méléder at Zürcher Gallery and Simon Hantaï at Timothy Taylor Gallery. Together these shows furnish a good moment to consider the range and achievement of French postwar abstraction.
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.
