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.