ArtSeen
Jim Lee Altamont
By Craig OlsonThere’s a tumbledown, pieced-together ambience to Jim Lee’s current exhibition at Freight + Volume. If you haven’t been to this gallery, it’s an excellent, small, cramped room.
Tony Cragg
By Robert C. MorganTony Cragg is a British sculptor who has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany for thirty years. His honors include several major museum exhibitions, mostly in Europe, and representation of Great Britain during the 43rd Biennale di Venezia and the Turner Prize, both in 1988.
Nicolas Carone Sculpture
By Thomas MicchelliWhat stays with you, first and last, from Nicolas Carone’s carved stone heads is their blunt, incandescent beauty.
Larry Miller Homage to Nam June Paik
By Warren FryThe night started out with Flux Radio + TV. Five small televisions and one radio were wheeled out on a cart and turned on; images and sounds of the day’s news blared for ten minutes. Then came Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns for cello and keyboard.
Trouble and the B-Keepers You Are Here: A Maze
By Warren FryAt Chashama’s 44th Street gallery, the collaborative team Trouble and the B-Keepers (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) invited over fifty performance groups, noise musicians and DJ’s to perform throughout the month of May.
Melissa Pokorny there/there
By Cassandra NeyeneschBedeviled by its roots in conceptualism, installation art is seen as inherently more political than painting. In the 90s, any really tedious piece of Po-Mo dogma—what’s that, did I hear the words “Whitney Biennial?—was nine times out of ten three-dimensional.
Comic Abstraction
By Ben La RoccoIn order to pass muster with the critical establishment, art today needs to be a critique. It must reveal an awareness of cultural perceptions dating back as far as the 60s such as: “America has a racist history,” or “Male sexuality tends to objectify females,” or “High art is about cultural snobbery.”
The Male Gaze
By Hrag VartanianWhen I was in college in the 1990s, there was an emerging movement called Gay Art; it was akin to Feminist Art, but focused on radical Queer Theory and its impact on male gay identity.
Joan Mitchell
By Jennifer RileyThe comprehensive survey exhibition of Joan Mitchell’s works on paper at Cheim and Read spans from the late 1950s to the year before she succumbed to cancer in 1992.
William Powhida
This Is A Work Of Fiction
By James Kalm
Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he’s bloated, vulgar, ignorant, complacent, and wallowing in historically unprecedented mountains of cash, with bile-colored spittle flecking the corners of his mouth.
Brandon Lattu 4 Models
By Jeremy SiglerEven a non-reader knows that books stack up quickly and ravenously consume space. Once they’ve taken the bookcase proper, they spread onto the secondary bookshelves: the desk, the dresser, the kitchen table, the back of the toilet, the car seat…
Shana Moulton Whispering Pines
By Jen SchwartingShana Moulton doesn’t seem to be feeling well. Her wrists and neck ache from too much time on the computer. Her migraines are so painful she vomits on the floor.
Katherine Bradford By Life & By Land, Recent Paintings
By John Yau“Desire for Transport,” the title of one of Katherine Bradford’s recent, breakthrough paintings, evokes the dilemma of painting and, to some degree, all art in a nutshell.
China Blue, Carol Salmanson
By Jill ConnerIn two concurrent exhibitions at Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery, China Blue and Carol Salmanson push beyond the limits set by formalism, articulating a notion of space through sound and luminescence.
Gregory Amenoff Facing North
By John YauThe quandary with Gregory Amenoff’s paintings is that he has never stepped back and interrogated that initial flush of deep feeling he had about the American visionary tradition, particularly Arthur Dove, at its most optimistic heights.
Kristen Schiele Gothicolor
By Shane McAdamsThere’s something immediately familiar about Kristen Schiele’s cycle of paintings at New General Catalog in Greenpoint: fragmented, architectural interiors scrubbed into medium-sized canvases with stylish, tongue-in-cheek recklessness, and enveloped by kaleidoscopic color schemes resembling a Black Forest fairy tale cloaked in moonlight.
Reuben Kadish’s Holocaust Sculpture
By Jill ConnerThere were only three works on display in Reuben Kadish’s Holocaust Sculpture at the Yeshiva University Museum, but those three spoke volumes about the visceral force of an artistic maverick who unaccountably remains in the margins of post-WWII American art history.
Dreaming of a Speech Without Words: The Paintings and Early Objects of H.C. Westerman
Will Barnet: Recent Work
By Thomas Micchelli
H.C. Westerman (1922-1981), one of the lone wolves of American art, served in both World War II and the Korean War and emerged a scathing critic of America’s ascendant militarism and mindless materialism.
Carroll Dunham
By John YauWhen Carroll Dunham was in his cartoony, biomorphic period (1982-1993), critics said that he belonged to the same family as Bill Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski.
Abby Leigh The Eye is the First Circle
By Ben La RoccoIn Abby Leigh’s painting, a naturalist’s sense of empiricism coexists with a mystic’s sense of wonder. In her previous show at Betty Cuningham, entitled “Systems,” the naturalist in Leigh was dominant.
Nicholas Krushenick
By John YauNicholas Krushenick (1929-1999) has rightfully been called the father of pop abstraction, which suggests that a lot of what is currently going on owes something to him. And while this is certainly the case, this well-meaning sobriquet doesn’t tell half the story.
Eric Holzman Drawings, 1990–2007
By Greg LindquistEric Holzman has a fondness for aged surfaces, which he creates as substrate for his modestly scaled drawings of landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. Drawings 1990-2007, a recent exhibitionat the New York Studio School, surveys the variety of touch he achieves with watercolor, egg tempera, charcoal and graphite.
