Chelsea Spin: Amy Sillman (1 borrowed image), Eddie Martinez, Jonathan Lasker and Lari Pittman, February 2016

(Photo, Estefania Velez). In the back room at Amy Sillman'sshow at Sikkema Jenkins, she printed gestures on canvas and worked with the found compositions. For images of the show, see Amy Sillman exhibition link

Eddie Martinez also printed on canvas at Mitchell, Innes and Nash, so after viewing Sillman's gorgeous show,  I wanted to see how he'd handle it. For images and press release, see Eddie Martinez exhibition link

Paint, pastel and printing, enlarging sketch into painting

Exuberant combination of materials - a hot sensibility contrasted with Sillman's cooler elegance--tho plenty of psychological heat in her work too--and coded imagery, diagrammed as an image bank in the exhibition booklet she designed for the show.

 Jonathan Lasker's exhibition at Cheim and Reid was a logical next step - a well-practiced medley of gestures co-existing, hand-crafted and excitingly divided.

The Lasker exhibition just closed. See installation photos here: Lasker exhibition link

Detail from a perfectly executed painting. What execution meant when he first began this work and what it means now are two different things--perhaps commentary on disparate but co-existent syntax has become a supreme freedom of gesture.

The large painting

The simultaneous contrast on this painting is not embodied in a photo, but this was alive, buzzing and twitching. A new 'character' emerges on the right, repeating in two new paintings in the show....

 Shifting speed to an elegiac exhibition by Lari Pittman at Gladstone, also now closed: a weird, gorgeous and poignant group of paintings in tribute to Goya's Los Caprichos. There are lines through the canvases like ruled paper adding another layer above the imagery we know. The color and mood of the paintings are dark--unsurprising given the source but for Pittman, muted.

Inspiration: Goya's Los Caprichos (here no. 24)

See installation images at Lasker exhibition link

Jardin~with Bushwick Glimpses

Polly Schindler

Jardin:
a botanically themed exhibition of artwork featuring:

- Alexandria Tarver - Amy Lincoln - Bonny Leibowitz - Dan Flanagan - Dana James - Ellen Siebers - Emilia Olsen - Evan Reehl Ryer - Giada Crispiels - Hidenori Ishii - Janice Nowinski - JJ Manford - Kerry Law - Lauren Collings - Liesl Pfeffer - Nick Wildermuth - Polly Shindler - Riad Miah - Ryan Cobourn - Susanna Coffey -

No.4 Studio is pleased to announce the third exhibition of its inaugural season: a botanically-themed exhibition of work by twenty artists. 

Jardín, in the simplest sense, is a show of work that reveals the beauty and delights of the garden and its fruits. It is the garden as a space of desire - a place that is inherently human and at the root of culture. This is not a landscape exhibition, but rather, an examination of the garden motif as a symbol of cultivation. In this sense, it presents art making as parallel: a meditative process of bringing activity to fruition.

The exhibition becomes a garden itself - a curated and cultivated oasis of artwork set against the rapidly transforming industrial landscape where this space for art exists. There is a distinction that separates garden from wilderness: an enclosure or boundary perhaps, but more so, the human hand and effort. The garden is a site of beauty, but, like visual art, is also a site of artifice.

It was thus on a cold and snowy Sunday, January 17th at the closing party.

Susanna Coffey

Who is this wonderful painter? I loved these, their brute physicality and touch, and forgot the lineup of names...

As this post will show, leaf is a wonderful addition to paint...such rich built-in contrast (of course the Italians figured this out long ago).

Susanna Coffey's beautiful rose, on high. The painting is light, showing the delicacy of the flower. 

Really excited about these weirdly realized, brush-mark exploiting patterned plant forms. 

Overview at Jardin

Janice Nowinski - a simply gorgeous painting, so historically resonant, yet fresh, especially the rich darks and the way the figure emerges from it.

Half album cover from the 1960s, half epic history painting~

Riad Miah - watery bubble forms - glazed yet light; the subtle coloration  serves the motif well.

Bonny Liebowitz, who will have a solo in the studio no. 4 space in fall 2016. These are oil on Japanese papers.

Causing a subtle and strange blurring of the paint within a complex space.

Life on Mars: Sideshow on Mars, part of an exchange with Rich Timpiero's Sideshow Gallery. 
The press release states, 
"The painters in our exhibition, who range in age from their twenties to their seventies and come from as far afield as Australia, California, Israel, and Georgia, include Mandy Lyn Ford, Pam Longobardi, Fran O’Neill, Zuska Vaclavik and Etty Yaniv. These artists are exhibiting side-by-side with painters who have been working for years in New York: Lizbeth Mitty, Art Guerra, Rich Timperio, Mary Devincentis, Joyce Yamada and Daniel John Gadd; cross-pollinations of artists with various backgrounds and personal histories that have formed communities around painting. This community of mutual influence is the heart of painting’s resurgence, ongoing renewal, and continuing relevance especially in Brooklyn."Life on Mars link

Daniel John Gadd

Gadd's merger of precious silver leaf with oil is ambitious and I want more! The show as a whole focused on the field as a space and in this case, Gadd exploited the grid of the silver leaf as a loose structure; wonder where he'll take these.

Etty Yaniv - detail

Within the dense, collaged surfaces one traverses spaces of photographs and sketches~linearity compressed physically - really exciting.

Etta Yaniv, the large work as a whole.

Beautiful, densely surfaced work in the side gallery at Life on Mars.

The illumination of the chest in this figure pulled me in, somehow given extra glow with the cold snow outside.

...and then to Sharon Butler at Theodore Arts~

Sharon Butler at Theodore -

Pared down compositions, exerting much more control on smaller substrates. No longer exposed substrates or sweeps of fabric with notations; the notations themselves are becoming more central and morphing into layouts, bringing a text reference. A language more strictly within the confines of painting as we traditionally know it is developing.
NOTE: This weekend is the last weekend of Butler's exhibition~

Figures in Space: Katherine Bradford at CANADA and Mernet Larsen at COHAN

Katherine Bradford at CANADA
Bradford/CANADA Link
In Hyperallergic, John Yau writes, "In her most recent work, Bradford has upped the stakes of her earlier work. For one thing, she has complicated her compositions by adding many more figures as well as dividing the ground in two or more distinct areas, water and sky, for example. The complications are the result of her pushing both the formal and imaginative further into a fictive domain without letting one get ahead of the other."

There is a luminescent backlighting in these paintings caused by vellaturas on top of vivid color, transparent and opaque balances and plain painterly magic.  On the top right of the painting, the whites of the waves are 'haloed' against the deep, velvety dark ground.

The treatment of form as another mark in space unites the figures and their spaces, reminding us that in fact the human body is some 70% water.

Interestingly Bradford is using acrylic, which reinforces her images of water, though the multiple layers and swipes of thick paint summon her oil painting background.

I have to go back to see this painting. It is a complete experience, clearly showing its history being turned all different ways, and the big, soft, fluffy Twinkie-like waves delight the eye to no end. At the same time the narrative is a bit foreboding, despite the candy color. 

Mernet Larsen at James Cohan. These are drawings in the back room.(I was too busy talking to people in the front room filled with her paintings).  She describes her work in the Paris Review as, “old-fashioned narrative paintings ... statements of longing.” “What I use are these perspectival ploys—diverse perspective, parallel perspective,” she told The Huffington Post last year. “You’re always sort of moving around inside the painting; you can never quite figure out where you’re standing, so you kind of absorb it. Matisse does that too for me too. And a lot of Japanese art, from the twelfth century particularly. They bring you inside and outside the space, you have no particular position. You can't quite get your bearings. And yet, I want you to have a sense of orient, a sense of mass, a sense of depth.”

Larsen/COHAN exhibition Link.
My favorite Larsen composition except for "Aw," an earlier work. This is a reverse-perspective faculty meeting sketch. I love these paintings, love her scholarship of Asian perspective, her grasp on figuration, her slow and careful way of building up form and space.

Larsen and I met at University of South Florida in 2003, her last year of teaching / my first.  Around that time she photographed faculty meetings, from which these paint sketches are inspired. I was shocked and thrilled that such a jewel resided in that setting, and her work continues to amaze me.

Here is the weirdest painting in the show, with "self-conscious painting" in keeping with Larsen's emphasis on constructed realities. What excites me most exciting is the elongated figures and how their bow and arrows carve through space. The blue disk flips between resembling a planet and a Turell-like skylight.

The space holds mind-popping characteristics of Fred Sandback or Robert Irwin installations in a totally hands-on way. 

A favorite detail from a family reunion. Arms really do that. I did not photograph the painting, but urge you to go see for yourself.