New York/Shanghai

Robert Mangold at Pace--circular drawing moving out of the loop, creating spatial depth

Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cunningham's Chelsea space
Loved how he handled the dark wire at top

Julian Schnabel at Gagosian - painting chosen partly for its relationship to the Sigmar Polke paintings a few posts back

Rockbund (RAM) Museum's Advance Through Retreat exhibition
Yang Jiedang's Heavenly Horse (2014)

Yangjiang Group, After Dinner Calligraphy, 2010, Photograph

Rockbund Lobby (for more information about the show, visit http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org)

Artists in the show include: Du Bianjiang, Jimmie Durham, Zarina Hashmi, Huang Pong Ping, Jiang Zhi, Li Zhenghtian, Andreas Mayer-Breenenstuhl, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Qingsong, Pablo Wendel, Xiao Kaiu, Yang Jiechang, Yangiang Group, Zheng Guogu. Monday night there is a discussion with Hou Hanru on ink painting at 7 PM--I will be there.

Across the river from my new neighborhood: Shanghai's Pudong District.

Spring Nature, Chelsea Style

Fred Tomaselli, Detail of new panel painting at James Cohan

The full image

Still working with aggregation, without the psychedelia of yore

The commentary focuses on the increasingly synthetic natural landscape

A curious transition, not without precedent in the previous work.

Michele Basora at Gitana Rosa, playing soft, bleeding watercolors against hard ink line.

Early modernism, decorative pattern and aggregation of marks in works on paper or on panel.

Gallery view

One of my favorites, a tea party

Eric Den Breejen at Freight + Volume (from Liza--scroll to bottom for full image)

Strange and beautiful color mixes with meditative application generates portraits from each artist's lyrics, essays and performances.

Detail

Marilla Palmer at Katherine Markel combining paint and natural forms

Sometimes in the round

Other times on paper, as in this lovely work

Den Breejen's Liza, where white is used as color to great surprise

Chelsea Fetish

Molly Herman at the Painting Center

Stacked marks, compiled on burlap and other textured surfaces

Detail of first painting

Layers upon layers

Seemingly simple, ...

and not. Paint crossing surfaces.

Ida Ekblad at Greene Naftali

"A technogenesis of the in-human, the non-human, the post-human."

"A wash that is more like a burnout." Born Oslo, Norway, 1980. Also makes weird, Greer Lankton-esque sculpture.

Roy Dowell at Lennon, Weinberg

Transparency appears like light in the middle of dense, American Indian-influenced patterns

He works from collages and is known for these, but in this show, branches out into sculptural objects and paintings

The green on this is a deep, emerald green, not possible to capture

Close view

Dowell was one of my teachers at Otis/Parsons (undergraduate). It is wonderful to see his work.

Ann Shostrom at Elizabeth Harris

Photo of this in entirety did not load, so detail of what looks like an overskirt and petticoat beneath

Foundations in abstract painting and 1960s garb, such as "Cher pants"--anyone remember those?

A Utopian, craft-based, hippy aesthetic infiltrates modernist ideals

Soutine at the new Paul Kasmin, 27th St.

A portrait, which neutral colors and elongated composition compel the eye.

Prussian blue, ochres, venetian reds

Swipes of the brush, flicks of the end, in unceasing movement of eye and mind

Portrait, in which warm tones at the bottom of the face seemed almost pulled over the cool, like a mask

Not as apparent in the detail but lovely nonetheless

Close view of final image on this post, forms within forms

One of several stacked landscapes

Form within form, the sheer physicality of material

A Chardin-like study