Wednesday, December 03, 2025

Mid-Season Catchup: Chelsea


From Milton Avery's The Figure at Karma, a spectacular survey of early work.
The stacked perspective, simplified forms and textural paint are great to ssee.

The color was sometimes shocking, carved in interlocking shapes.

There is something about these paintings that remind me of T'ang Dynasty painting--the space feels measured yet spherical, with us inside of it.

Tang Dynasty 13th century



Tom McGlynn at Rick Webster Fine Art in This Here

New jumps for him in both the color combinations (the above pops so much more vividly in life) and compositions. 
I'm excited by these flashing color squares. 

Hannah Beerman at Thomas Erben in a two-person show. I was interested in her free-wheeling approach and appreciated work on a small scale as above.

I am thinking about spontaneous or random painting, the joy and confusion of a critical desire for definition when painting really only ever exists. This is the circumstance of the final decision.

Likewise another very small painting, held together by a red violet holding everything down.

Agnes Martin, Happiness, 2001, in Innocent Love. These images looked so perfect in my camera and the photos are so bad, here is the Pace website or you to see them properly.


The color is so beautifully applied in transparent, watercolor washes. This is a show of late work. It is magnificent. The stillness and fullness in this work replenishes me.

Painter/Model at Skarstedt, featuring the Picasso-esque, exuberant paintings of Jameson Green's Cogito, Ergo Sum,
Danielle Orchard's Quick Study, 57 x 61 inches from 2025 (wonderful),
Picasso's idyllic Le peintre et son modele dans un paysage from September 1963,

Paula Rego's Balzac Story from 2011, pastel on paper mounted on aluminum, 59 x 66-3/4 inches.
Detail - Rego is always so great at capturing a wistful sense of being trapped.

Surprise! Chantal Joffe from this year, The Painter and Her Model, 72 x 96 inches, limpid and light.

Detail 
Christina Banban's dynamic Studio, El Prat, two panels creating a work at 78-3/3 x 118-1/8 inches

Some details--doublings, corrections, it all locks together.


Dana Schutz's Arrangement from 2010, 72 x 90 inches
Picasso's Le peintre et son modele dans un paysage from May 1963, 35 x 45 inches (roughly)
Eric Fischl's (What is there) Between the Artist and the Model from 1994, 40 x 30 inches.
What a fabulous, museum quality show, a beautiful curation.

Thick, viscous paint on underlayers gleaming through in Sean Scully's solo at Lisson, all works 2025.
Scaffolding and blurred areas of focus give the sense of walking through the city.
First Banban now this, feels great to see big brushswipes of color. 
Wrapping up the day with Ming Fay's Midnite Porridge at Kurimanzutto. I was so sorry to hear Ming Fay had passed earlier this year. In 2008, I exhibited with him at Lesley Heller's uptown space. I loved his work, but never knew about his life the way this exhibition frames it. On the gallery website, it is possible to download a great timeline of his accomplishments. The Shanghai-born artist came to the US in the 1960s to attend art school in Ohio before moving to New York. He was a committed artist, collaborator, teacher, and public artist, whose subway station at Delancey Street on the F, M, J, Z is legend. 

Detail of a large, paper-mache flower
Lovingly made natural forms


It was a lovely day.

 

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part III: Cora Cohen at Greene Naftali

Small Space, 2012, oil on linen, 29 x 32 inches
The first painting in this knockout decade survey Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012-22 at Greene Naftali.

She must have used a marble dust or water absorbent gesso, because the surface was so matte the blue shape looked collaged as if the paint and surface were one. Flat and matte to an infinite degree, one I would have liked to achieve in oils but never could.

If I Weren't, 2012, oil on linen, 67 x 69 inches. 
This relates to Curtain 8 Black, 2013, Flashe, graphite, and pigment on linen, 69 x 9 inches (on gallery website linked above). It also overlaps in Louise Fishman's vertical strokes in the late work, with the hint of a grid, but over time each artist's unique mark becomes more distinct.  When I knew Cohen in the 1990s, her paintings were dark, impasto, and dense with glitter. Whether heavy oil or watercolor, she was always innovating, out in front.

Terrain Vague, 2022, Flashe and watercolor on linen, 40 x 58 inches
Was this named after Mira Schor's brilliant essay Figure/Ground in her groundbreaking book Wet (1997)?

Detail of Terrain Vague. The surface almost like pumice, absorbing the watercolor instantly.

Portrait of an Artist, 2022, Flashe and watercolor on linen, 59 x 39 inches
Where painting and drawing truly fuse. Two Coats of Paint's Cora Cohen obituary quotes her saying, “I have continued working on paintings one at a time, often printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working back into that printed armature directly, introducing conflicting scenarios. I do have a notion of what I want my current work to be, how I want it to present itself. I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting. One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree, a method of turning failure into a compelling act.” –Cora Cohen, 2022, NYC"

DETAIL

We close with the ethereal Veronica's Veil, 2022, acrylic, colored pencil, Flashe, and watercolor on cotton duck, 61 x 59 inches, and some details. It's hard to write words about this painting, which foresees (in my experience) the desire to pour and paint transparently together. 




 

Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part II: Friedel Dzubas at Lincoln Glenn


Juicy, boisterous paint from Friedel Dzubas in The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions, through November 8th at Lincoln Glenn. Link here: https://www.lincolnglenn.com/exhibitions/38-the-slow-unfolding-friedel-dzubas-final-abstractions/works/


Some details of the prior painting--beautiful opaques and transparents together

Also hardened chips of paint among the exciting brushed areas. 

Amidst the maelstrom one uncovers vapor...

Two beauties as well as pulp paper works (that are painted on).
The exhibition covers a decade, similar to Cora Cohen's survey at Greene Naftali, here, 1980-1989.

I believe this is 1983, similar to his early studio-mate Frankenthaler--each harvesting a language for abstraction.