Raggedy Ann's Foot: Pattern, City, Body: Katia Santibanez, Arlene Sheshet, Stanley Lewis, Cecily Brown, Olga Chernysheva and Loie Hollowell.

Katia Santibanez at Morgan Lehman. Gallery Link
This exhibition shows a new direction that moves beyond the linear marks of earlier works to denser, textile-like patterns painted on absorbent grounds that render the surface matt and flat with a delicate touch.

The color, with more neutrals, has become chromatically fuller over the years.

Here, a detail from a larger painting. At the opening there were too many people to gain distance from the work, but check link above or better yet just go to the show!

Arlene Sheshet at Sikkema Jenkins. Gallery Link

Such odd, pleasing configurations, like signage, or pre-historic forms.

Markers of a private logic.

This totem heralds the visitor's entrance.

And carries associations to caves, mountains, green walls and construction sites..

Stanley Lewis at Sidecar (Betty Cunningham). Gallery Link

With a second show at the New York Studio School. Gallery Link

I've always loved these drawings, approached with a ferocity that suggests piercing the atmosphere with charcoal sticks and literally imbedding it into the surface. They are so physical.

What looks like a simple view...

Is hard-won in layers of dense build-up of ink and graphite and gnarled pulp, as marks accrue and vision forms. It's old-school, and it's good.

There is something so primal and satisfying about drawing directly from the motif.

The embodiment of gesture does not fail to convey meaning.

Gouges and layers.

Things pieced together.

This interior recalls Gideon Bok's work: Artist's Blog

Cecily Brown at Drawing Center. Surprisingly fresh to see her large scale sketches after Hogarth and others, such as Breughel. Love the soft pink wall! Gallery Link

There is a lively spontaneity in the drawings, as if putting ideas together as a form of research. Notions of finish have definitely changed, not only a result of the Met Breuer's recent Unfinished exhibition and discussions of provisional painting, but technology. The alluded to, or incomplete appears more convincing.

Perhaps it is the merger of subjective and objective modes in play. The best of Brown's drawings maintain a light touch and interpenetration between medium and paper, as well as

space and value, keeping forms open and color local, glazed with wash.

In the back room, Olga Gernysheva, a Moscow-based visitor to New York last November. Her show was surprisingly wonderful, capturing sights normally unseen. Gallery Link

Retail, seen in terms of landscape.

The most beautifully rendered drawing of all. I didn't think charcoal on watercolor paper would yield much, but the broad marks balance the paper texture.

Though formally the drawings are interesting the best part about them is the new, even absurd perception of daily western life.

The charcoal works especially well with blurring to indicate speed. From the press release: "This new work is a departure for Chernysheva: although she has depicted the urban landscape throughout her career, her focus has been her home country. Vague Accent explores the relation between travel and attentiveness through a collection of ordinary scenes—subway stations, museums, city streets—overlaid with collaged texts by the artist. In her words, these works “show things that are already visible…things not asking to be looked at.”