Barbara A. MacAdam
Barbara A. MacAdam is a New York-based freelance arts writer.
David Novros cunningly creates a kind of 3D fresco. The longtime fresco-inspired minimalist, bred in the company of Donald Judd and in the chapels of Italy, adds depth and a bit of texture to Juddian flatness and precision. He sometimes builds with what seem to be solid blocks of space.
Rona Pondick and I have spent many hours pondering the complexity of her work and the bravery of her approach with her often shocking relationship to nature, in particular with the human, animal, and material body. What stands out as especially uncomfortable are her forthright expressions of sex and private emotions. In the process of assembling her work, she has said she has learned to live in the past, the present, and even the future, materially and mentally.
Paula Cooper has been activating the currently uneasy New York art scene with a number of ambitious and inventive exhibitions, such as this presentation of the late Post-Minimalist sculptor Joel Shapiro.
While working and excelling in the most elegant and formal styles of international modernism, the Cuban-born high-abstract artist Carmen Herrera distinguished herself by demonstrating the weight and strength of drawing as a device for building two-dimensional structures as well as for showing the power of the line as a means of connection. We see her in this expansive show as a striking geometric colorist, an architectural painter, a consummate theoretician, as well as a designer.
Limbs, clothes, light reflected off of them, the tables and beds for sleeping and eating, desks for working—these are among the compelling ingredients of Catherine Murphy’s exacting and affecting paintings and drawings.
Thomas Scheibitz builds with opposites—abstraction and figuration, two and three dimensions, past and present, and everything else—and we, his audience, try to force, conceal, and reveal connections among them.
What is an art critic today, then? What is the role of art criticism, and how do critics survive? What is criticism’s (and the critic’s) impact on the work and career of artists and the culture at large? And, shifting to the perspective of the critics and a question much less often asked, what impact does their choice of career have on their lives, and why choose such a non-lucrative vocation/avocation that is ironically, tauntingly so privilege-adjacent?
The late prints in this show, titled Room, Sea & Sky, on view through October 26, take us inside Guston’s head as, in the last year of his life, 1980, he reworked and concentrated themes and obsessions. In these lithographs, created with his print collaborator Gemini G.E.L., we find his dreams and fears documented.
Brie Ruais’s medium is her own—it’s herself and it’s the earth, the soil, the sand, the sea, the sky, the atmosphere, and the wind. Her exhibition, Bone Dice, possesses an enigmatic beauty conveyed by electrifying colors and a rhythmic sense of motion.
Titled Soil Horizon, Fernández's show leads us through a landscape of time, history, art history, memory, emotion, and thought. She invites us to immerse ourselves in her work, a simulacrum of her universe. Hanging in the front room are four large relief paintings from the “Soil Horizon” series, composed of solid charcoal, wood, volcanic rock, and mixed media on aluminum panel.
In this imaginatively orchestrated show, Zurich-based curator and author Dieter Schwarz has creatively assembled a huge wall of Robert Moskowitz’s drawings, reproducing verbatim the arrangement that had been posted on the artist’s studio wall. It’s an enlightening and moving tribute to Moskowitz, who died just days after the opening of the show.
Richmond Burton has happily been taking the measure of his own art throughout his career. The Alabama-born artist, who trained first as an architect at Houston’s Rice University, continues to reassess and reconfigure his work for the present moment.
In this rich, dense, and compact show, Mel Kendrick focuses on his generally solid, large, puzzle-like sculptures, most in his current signature tones of yellow and black, creating a dynamic continual exchange with scribbled surface-markings playing in contradistinction to weighty, muscular structures.
To “read“ Eddie Martinez’s new show Wavelengths demands that we activate our propensity for a scattered, frenetic attention. In his paintings, Martinez, as ever, sends us spiraling through all possible associations, from nature to toys to politics, from still life to continual-motion life, to jazz and to sports.
The singular longtime SoHo art dealer Margarete Roeder, 84, passed away on 11 December, 2023 at her home in Cologne. She was notable for her fragile bohemian elegance and quirky charm with a touch of wit and a notable refinement of taste.
In her vivid clay constructions Lola Montes creates a visual memoir that draws upon a wide range of sources. Alternately eloquent and gruff, the work moves between the past and present touching upon the storytelling that ultimately informs mythologies, religions, and even the history of art.
To puzzle over Cildo Meireles’s exhibition One and Some Chairs/Camouflages is simultaneously dumbfounding and appealing. There’s a new playfulness in his work that makes us ponder the what and why of perception, the way we understand what we see, and how the object depends on how we see it. We expect austerity in this conceptualist’s creations, which are familiarly recognized as elegant and monotone, and often installed with expanses of sand spread across a gallery’s floor made to resemble an indoor desert.
Ruth Miller presents a very personal language of viewing in this intricate exhibition, showing how differently drawing and painting express themselves when addressing the same subjects.
A good student and a profoundly intuitive practitioner, Asawa obsessively explored the paths of seeing through nature, craft, history, material matters (such as paper folding), and drawing styles, including the Greek meander (that is, the classical winding geometric pattern that can continue indefinitely), and performance and dance. As a result, she left behind a highly styled and tightly controlled body of work that soundly situates itself between compulsively wrought craft and delicately conceived fine art.
Why appropriation? Joe Fig extends his exploration of the practice into and out of the realm of novelty. Here, he delves into the experience of the landscape of an artwork—its dimensions, positions, neighbors, and responses to light and to us, its inhabitants.
James Brooks was, above all, a man of his times—that is, his various times. The exhibition at the Parrish makes evident what many knew Brooks to be: a very fine painter, attentive to his position in contemporary art history, to his influences and peers, to his surrounding landscapes, to society, and to history.
Elisabeth Kley revels in the kitsch, the eccentric, and the natural rhythm of patterns. Her drawings and ceramics span time and cultures with intelligence, charm, and humor, as well as allusions to nature and the way we play in it.
Lisa Corinne Davis’s new paintings, created between 2022 and 2023, represent an evolution from her earlier works. Not a change in direction or an abrupt turn, but rather a development expressed in an extended, nuanced conversation with herself.
Stretching along the hallway of David Nolan Gallery and into a light-flooded exhibition space, two large offices, and a parlor, Jorinde Voigt’s show The Match features a number of sculptures called Dyads (made of gold-plated stainless steel), and Triads (composed of wood), together with nearly thirty works on paper. Covering ten years of production and evolving techniques and media, Voigt’s content has been both coherent and diverse.
This fascinating exhibition, curated by Gerard Mossé and Sebastian Sarmiento, leads us through physical, spatial, and spiritual realms to speculate on the nature of mostly abstract art in its many manifestations. It takes us through the variegated present, from the poetic expressions of artists like the Lebanese-born Etel Adnan to the young, Indigenous painter Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe.
Conceptual-modernist painter Jacqueline Humphries is actively securing her place in contemporary art history, and she is doing so in a particularly literal way, making unabashed reference to those who came before her and to those working more or less alongside her.
At play in the fields of abstraction, British artist Fiona Rae forces us to consider what indeed is abstraction. Could it be a part removed from a whole, or a piece used to construct a form? Can it stand alone? While this might appear to be a simple and overused trope today, it remains a provocative one, sitting at the core of anything we call art, and Rae’s works are truly art about art.
The entire installation, filling the gallery’s several rooms and corridors, is something like a stage set, with all the props either tossed about or lined up—and the performance not yet rehearsed. Where should the pieces go? What is their purpose? How do they relate to one another? Do they? And, above all, how do they activate our imaginations?
The seven artists in this exhibition—all born in mainland China between 1979 and 1987—are represented by nineteen works that range from video to performance to installations, digital art, painting, and more. Each tells a different story with wit, curiosity, techno savvy, painterly skill, and/or sociability.
What a wonderful time to discover the sly and seductive charm of Edith Schloss’s largely under-the-radar art, writing, and life.
Claire Sherman entangles us in intimate and intricate landscapes: once we enter, we cannot escape. But this work is not about the dangers of nature. To the contrary, the paintings in this show, ranging from the delicate 30-by-26 Wildflowers (2020) to the room-filling (96 by 234) triptych Trees and Vines (2021), are intended as evidence of the harm human activities are inflicting on the global environment. But in depicting our pernicious intrusions, Sherman creates a paradox: how beautiful that damage appears! Is it a trick? Sherman brings to bear a richness of color and activity that almost seems to celebrate our meddling in the natural order, and this, as unlikely as it may seem, offers a note of optimism.
It’s as if, in this sensitive exhibition at Peter Blum, Esther Kläs’s sculptures, works on paper, and installations had themselves chosen their relationships with one another and set the stage for performing together.
Murphy’s profoundly precise, deadpan depictions of all quotidian matter, from rags to trees, hair, doors, gratings, and even a camouflage blanket—often excerpts from artifacts and scenes—focus our attention on the power of the part in relation to the whole, the underlying tension between the two. We are left to wonder whether the part builds or undermines our perception of the entire picture.
This warm and elusive show can be befuddling. Its reach is far and subtle, and embraces many modalities while its expression is quiet and minimal. It is what it isn’t.
Influenced by Warhol, Rauschenberg, the graphic art of Pop as Edward Ruscha construed it, and the shock and schlock of advertising slogans and other signage, Giorno mixed media to promulgate feelings, beliefs, and social justice.
Curator Samantha Friedman has made a sensitive selection of some 80 drawings from MoMA’s international pool of artists working between 1948 and 1961.
Meaty and heady, Eddie Martinez’s densely packed paintings, rich with associations and imagery—all in the form of quotidian objects, sports paraphernalia, kitchen and dining items, art-history fragments—refuse to commit to a specific time or style.
Elizabeth Schwaiger sets in motion a cacophony of styles, ideas, colors, and movements in this dense show spread out over two floors.
Indeed, Springford’s paintings, with their spiritual meanderings and discomforting vivid colors that appear to congeal and darken toward the center of the canvas, seem to strike a cultural nerve today. We are drawn into circular dark voids—evoking sexual orifices, pockets of the cosmos, the eye of a hurricane, and the caverns of dream and memory in the mind.
The sandwiched matter of Lindman’s images oozes its way to the surface, often leaking out and dripping in translucent rivulets. The artist makes his acrylic paint earn its keep, transforming it into something surprisingly rich, impastoed, and creamy.
Voigt conveys her conceptual imaginings in color and line. Her peregrinations lead us through a sea of hand-dyed blue paper that has a Disney-esque underwater appearance in which strange, sometimes almost identifiable forms swim or float.
These works capture one significant period in Guston’s multifaceted career (or careers), hinting at the breadth of his artistic and intellectual reach.
The intimate drawings in this virtual show, astutely curated by Michaëla Mohrmann, associate curatorial director at Pace, take viewers on a charming, witty, ironic, and droll perambulation through the landscape of Saul Steinberg’s mind.
Extrapolating from American poet Robert Frost’s iconic reflection “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” we see in Power Wall both the brute reality of the wall and its much-loved qualities. Something in the work of both Robin Rhode and Nari Ward invites us to see the wall as so many things: barrier, writing surface, canvas, community center, basketball court, dance floor, and even decorative backdrop.
Although she is a digital painter Cortright also embraces tradition, and while her medium is new, she does not shy away from redeploying something old. A painter who doesn’t use paint, she teaches us to look using her tools as we follow her lead through represented landscapes and between hanging sheets of abstract images.
Joanna Pousette-Dart’s work is a visceral experience. Organic and warm forms embrace one another just as they do the viewer. Similarly, the paintings’ colors are sweet and seductive and actively engage one another in often indefinable and unexpected contrasts.
The explosion of angst begins here with a “Dear Reena” letter to the gallery: Merlin Carpenter states, first, that he will not be attending the opening, however “strange a social situation” it might provoke. Of course, since Reena Spaulings is a collective enterprise, the position Carpenter takes is broadly directed; he is critiquing an abstraction.
Layers of texture and materials—paint, oil pastel, and mica—supported by pattern upon pattern in shaky thin lines set the foundation for Jackie Saccocio’s forceful, physically and emotionally self-reflective paintings.
So far and yet so near, the antithetical aesthetics of John Chamberlain and Donald Judd are provocatively at play in this compelling show of sculptures, wall pieces, and “paintings” from the 1960s and ’70s. The artists could be considered the alpha and omega of 20th century American sculpture.
The title of German artist Günther Uecker’s fascinating show at Lévy Gorvy, Notations invokes many meanings of the term, from a system of symbols representing information, to the noting of and keeping track of ideas, to the staking out of intervals in time. The works on display here create a visible beat.
A fascinating glimpse into the origins of Alexander Calder’s thinking and evolution, this abbreviated retrospective is a rare opportunity to examine the artist’s early experimental and tentative production. The show follows Calder’s singular career, illuminating the artist's later, resolved and fully realized work, deploying some 70 objects from the mid-1920s through the 1950s.
Steinberg’s paintings run the gamut in associations, from the lyricism of Paul Klee to the political satire of Thomas Rowlandson, to the elegantly limned Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico.
The Berlin-based, West German born-and-raised artist Gregor Hildebrandt was in New York for the opening of his show at Perrotin Gallery on the Lower East Side. It’s a disarmingly huge, three-story, former hardware emporium on Orchard Street, where the blaring signage announcing Beckenstein Hardware, remains intact as a reminder of the building’s history, and underscores the persistence of the past in the ultra-modern light-filled interior.
Judith Murray’s Tempest, at Sundaram Tagore’s New York gallery, features a whirlwind of mosaic-like compositions.
In his intriguing, often provocative, interpolated show at the Brooklyn Museum, Rob Wynne builds, reflects, and—more literally—reflects on connections in American art. In doing so he manages to intervene in the course of art history itself. He pulls at the museum's paintings and sculptures and activates them through light and language, transmuting the collection by means of his signature hand-poured, mirrored glass.
Clear, bright, and crisp, Daniel Rich’s recent paintings might also be viewed as eerie and unstable.
Back in 1959, Robert Moskowitz was making art that broadly and barely stood some place between conceptual, minimal, pop, abex, expressionistic, and new imagist. But in the subtlest of ways it belonged to no specific genre, and in that sense, was also very much a part of its time.
On the occasion of David Row’s recent show, Zen Road Signs, at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Rail contributor Barbara MacAdam met with the artist in his longtime SoHo loft filled with examples of his art from various periods.
It’s very difficult to write about people you know well. The moment you start, you immediately suspect your own words and perceptions—you haven’t said enough? Made your point clearly? Or is it too simplistic? Obviously nobody perfectly fits a description.
To begin with, as a critic, editor, and simple enthusiast, I find criticism to be an often delightful form of self-indulgence—one that allows me to set forth a problem for myself and then figure out how to solve it.