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| Inka Essenhigh at Miles McEnery. Gallery Link |
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| She reconstructs the rhythms in scroll painting. There is also a feeling of early animation cells. |
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| Reflecting the Daoist belief that all nature is animate, while acknowledging the slim margin between scroll painting and cartoon. |
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| At DC Moore, Robert Kushner painting on embroidered Indian fabrics called dupattas, in his new exhibition (he also exhibited last year). Gallery Link |
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| Detail |
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| The concept of over and under, applied on fabric, can be exciting territory (another detail three below). |
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| Also at DC Moore: Katia Santibanez's long-standing exploration of science and nature generates increasingly complex systems. Gallery Link |
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| Kushner's fabric layers (detail). |
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| Stepping back and forward in a detail of early Al Held painting at Cheim and Reid. Troweled on in lavish abundance, the earthen color mixes create a topographical as well as pictorial space. |
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| Gorgeous, earthen hues move from the flat of the linen at top to mountainous swells. |
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| Texture and layer is color. |
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| Across, top to bottom, back to front. |
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| The dancing rhythms of color generate a visual roller coaster that foregrounds Held's late mural paintings. |
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| And the combinations are delicious. |
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| In the back room, larger, more organized scale--but less travel (not much less). An earlier portion of this work (when Held was still living in Paris) is on view at Nathalie Karg. Gallery Link |
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| Mernet Larsen at James Cohan. A series of details tilting the iPhone at various angles reveal how odd and tricky her reverse perspectives are in the new show, Situation Rooms. |
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| Gallery Link |
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| Included for contrast and a view to her development since, Larsen's iconic faculty meeting paintings. How well I remember these rooms (Larsen hired me at USF) and many of the protagonists. |
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| I could not stop staring at the arm. So succinct, so odd. And the orange highlight beneath! Not to mention the wall slipping away and forward simultaneously. |
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| Reverse perspective, long a trope of Larsen's from her love of Japanese painting. |
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| Love the seat--he's solid enough to unite with the structure. |
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| Keltie Ferris. Gallery Link |
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| Beautiful textural shifts between impasto marks and wash. |
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| Oddly casual and constructed at the same time, these paintings are elegantly finished, but they push. |
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| Ferris' drawings offer a thesis for the show upon entering the gallery. |
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| Jane Freilicher. This show made me realize how her work helped me survive graduate school in Chicago after moving from LA in winter. First I began covering my paintings in white then collaging and tearing the landscape into pieces, shards, or marks in small paintings. I looked at these works a lot in reproduction. |
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| Such simple, elegant, coherent paintings. Here's the: Gallery Link |
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| The way the pattern on the vase literally draws a line through the painting--playing with the edge of the vase on right, heightened by the dark behind...delicious! |
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| In tandem with Katz and Porter, Freilicher, in painting the urban view, creates a domestic NY genre |
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| Throughout the paintings, despite their sweeping interiors |
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| and exterior views, |
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| Insist on subtle geometries to hold loose, casual paint application in check. |
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| Carroll Dunham, in a knockout show that synthesizes his work from the last few exhibitions with real ferocity. Gallery Link |
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| Encapsulating the orbs in earlier paintings filled with smears of paint and pencil notations, into body parts. |
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| I will fix this and the following details, but you can still see the tight structure and variation within the blacks... |
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| Fin de Siecle |
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| Yet we remain human, vulnerable. |
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| Terry Winters at Matthew Marks (24th St.). Always wonderful to see those craggy worked surfaces, made with hogs hair rounds. Gallery Link |
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| Maren Hassenger at Susan Inglett, a stark, timely and elegant show. Gallery Link |
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| Newspaper clippings in an enormous Afro. |
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| Shocking, beautiful, stops you. |
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| Instanbul-based artist Suzan Batu at the Phatory on east 9th St. Paintings woven with marks. Gallery Link |
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| Detail. |
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| The color combinations in her work, the way the paint is put together in optically charged, flat surfaces feel vibrant and exciting. The show's conceit of fabrics from a Turkish store , the only available though she and her peers longed for American fashion. speaks to upcoming trade agreements and the global flow of goods--or not. |
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| Suzan Batu. Her paintings are almost like maps, as well as fabric scraps. |