10/23/19 10/23/19

Patrick McDonough on Benjamin Edwards

Entering the studio with “Justin” was an unforgettable kind of magic, like passing through a Super Nintendo game portal where the colors and the physics forever change.

10/13/19 10/13/19

Barry Nemett on Robert Rauschenberg

All looked pleasant enough near the foot but, like a dramatic plot twist, everything closer to the bed’s head looked war-torn, tortured.

10/4/19 10/4/19

Heide Fasnacht on Martin Kippenberger

The gizmo he depicts with slapdash but accurate strokes of orange and red is reasonable, yes, but dissolves into the vagaries of emotional weather; it does not add up to the logical structure it pretends to be.

7/14/19 7/14/19

Jessica Stoller on the Sévres Breast Bowl

The dairy she created allowed her to demonstrate her political agency while intertwining ideas related to femininity, nature and health.

7/1/19 7/1/19

Ruth Marten on Paul Caranicas

He’s condensed a mall into a theatre set, flattening the rich detail into a sort of Greek chorus to serve the dumb central gun shop.

6/11/19 6/11/19

Katie Miller on 'Young Girl with a Dead Bird'

Pupils dilate when we are happy and contract when we are sad. Inky dilated pupils are attractive, which is why most portraits depict their sitter with sparkling black saucers.

5/17/19 5/17/19

Jane Irish on Karen Kilimnik's Programme of Humour

She has a beautiful hand that is ruled by a fairy, but sometimes a demon gives her a stick to paint with.

5/1/19 5/1/19

Lilian Day Thorpe on Nicolas de Staël

Breaking the natural world down into its basic forms, the painting as a whole evokes a quiet hum.

4/17/19 4/17/19

Julian Kreimer on Andrea Belag's Sunday Painter

The newest paintings convey a lot of those--the lightness that attends letting go, the playfulness and humor that comes when one is attentively waiting, waiting.

4/7/19 4/7/19

Azita Moradkhani on Louise Bourgeois

The tension between the bodies of mother and child builds up until the moment of physical separation with the delivery of a new entity in the world. Bourgeois depicts that moment using transparent skins of juicy crimson.

2/5/19 2/5/19

Julie Heffernan on El Greco

El Greco emphasizes this theme of separation—head from body, conceptual realm from sensorial realm, upper half from lower half, white from black.

1/23/19 1/23/19

Brenda Goodman on Her Work in Stages

There is something about feeling that rightness of a painting when I’m 75 that feels so very satisfying.

1/10/19 1/10/19

Lavar Munroe on Folkert De Jong and Expansive Painting

Evidence of deconstructing form and then “healing” those breaks was apparent in the yellow and pink adhesive substrates bleeding through the crevasses of incisions.

12/29/18 12/29/18

Constance Mallinson on Manet's and von Werefkin's Ragpickers

Few previous painters were capable of challenging and disturbing the consumerist mentality and self-satisfaction of the middle class and the economic and social systems that sustained them.

12/18/18 12/18/18

Wendy Letven on Simona Prives

The alchemy of using a fragment of a scan of parsley to represent a forest was a revelation.

12/10/18 12/10/18

Laurie Hogin on Grant Wood

The readmission of artists like Grant Wood into high art discourses may open the door to many more types of representation, inclusive of many more places, lives, and subjectivities.