In These Amorphous Times

In these amorphous times, it makes sense to look at some of the abstraction going on in the city right now, starting with the Late Walter Darby Bannard's Florida oeuvre. I've always wanted to see these paintings, made after he began tenure at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.
Gallery Link

An insouciant vocabulary of swipes, puddles and geometric shapes.

Walter Darby Bannard, a pedagogue, blog participant and fearless painter.

Jackie Lipton and Cari Rosmarin Open Studio. I met Lipton at Westbeth. She's a night painter.

Cari Rosmarin, who shows her work frequently at Westbeth. 

Rosmarin, Detail. Her paint is fearless! Landscapes and rivulaets of paint, incised with a brush end with wild spirit. Rosmarin website

Jackie Lipton, Detail of a two-panel painting. Lipton Website

Lipton's painting in full, a walk through the city at night.

Andreas Siqueland of Oslo, creating an immersive room at Regina Rex.
Gallery Link

Small, thick, casual paintings upon a muslin painting does, at its best, scramble the eye.

Anke Weyer at Canada. Bravura process painting.
Gallery Link

The German painter, born 1974, created the exhibition over the summer in a barn in upstate NY.

Weyer, Detail.

Weyer Detail.

Zao Wou-Ki, Chinese expatriate/Parisian (1920-2013) at the Asia Society.
Museum Link 

Beautiful drawings combining the calligraphic and western volumetric approaches.

Translating ink to oil

and back again

A perfectly splendid painting - a photograph can't capture its rich and varied surface.

No Photography Allowed - but this beautiful show is on at Asia Society, 68th and Park, through January 8th, 2017. A comfort in these strange times and an inspiration for travelers and cultural nomads.

Pattern, City, Body Part II: Trenton Doyle Hancock at James Cohan

More from the Master of Interior Life, Pattern and Body: Trenton Doyle Hancock at James Cohan's Grand Street Space

Similar position to Clintel Steed's painting at Steven Harvey in September

Detail. In the 60s, the British had a school of painting called Kitchen Sink~Hancock is worthy of the title now.

The artist with his gorgeous, multiple edition toy

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.” 

Loie Hollowell at Feuer/Mesler. Gallery Link

Weird, rounded scribbles adorn visually sculpted surfaces, like body hair.

The paintings are described in terms of duality of body and landscape, homages to artists Judy Chicago and Georgia O'Keefe. 

Taut paintings, filled sexual tension and compositional precision.

Forms literally built out from the surface, creating nooks and crannies.

Sun and Moon

Patterns in Body and Place