Tom McGlynn
Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in the NYC area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at Parsons/ The New School.
The painter James Howell developed his very particular style over a series of formal and geographic changes that together shaped his unique vision.
The consistency of his vision of the offhand everyday is explored in this exhibition and attendant book, both titled Early Work.
Perhaps the show’s title, Housing Development, is meant to be read in duplex fashion: referencing both the basic box-and-gable structure of a house and the esoteric notion of abstract constructs that “house” themselves. Therein is niched the animus of Korman’s abstract symbolism.
I had the pleasure to get to know Thornton Willis on the occasion of his one-person show, A Painting Survey: Six Decades, held at David Richard Gallery in an expansive space in uptown Manhattan. The scale and breadth and striking color of his paintings were a revelation to me. Yet what struck me most was their attitude of direct address.
Mira Dayal’s second solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone is understated in a sharply inventive way. Entering the gallery, one encounters what appears to be an ensemble of steel templates arrayed across the expansive concrete floor space that together form an arcana of post-industrial hieroglyphs. The show’s barely descriptive title, Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove, is a kind of conceptual feint.
In the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., sharply curated by Susanne Walther, a large-scale installation of one of his signature fabric works anchors the presentation
What becomes a “painter’s painter” most? Alternatively, what becomes a painting-painted most? An expansive indeterminacy exists between these relative ideas raising the question as to which may hold more significance.
On the occasion of Mara De Luca’s upcoming exhibition at TOTAH, artist and Rail Editor-at-Large Tom McGlynn paid a visit to De Luca’s studio. They engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about the “critical core” of De Luca’s work, the influence of the West Coast on her practice, and by what means the painting can invent itself.
Chuck Webster’s kaleidoscopic imagination contains multitudes of experience sieved through a very specific abstract syntax of colors, forms, gestures, and texts toward a grand, totalizing encounter.
Mark Bloch engaged in the elastic back and forth of a worldwide community of like-minded practitioners of what might also be called postal performance art, the “props” of which he carefully archived (between 1978-2013). These were then collected by the Fales Library of New York University which occasioned the current exhibition, Panmodern! The Mark Bloch Postal Art Network Archive.
This most recent collation of the Ad Reinhardt's works at Zwirner surveys his late involvement in printmaking, and its attendant processes, and so offers some clues as to the artist’s image development, placing technical emphasis on art-in-the-making, prior to its precipitation down to “art-as-art.”
All illusions of the call of the pastoral aside, the (now decades long) escalation of artists decamping from New York City for the Hudson Valley is more of a desperate search for solace, paradoxically, from urban marginalization and market pressures than a sentimental relation to the land. It makes complete sense that institutions would take their hint and follow suit.
Seeking a space to work in the winter of 2021, TARWUK seized the opportunity to occupy a large studio previously used by the painter Ron Gorchov, who had passed away the previous summer. Taken with its tall ceilings and almost stage-like architecture, the duo had a collective thought to create a large painting, but then it occurred to them that the scale of the canvas they tacked up on a 16×16 ft. wall suggested a theatrical backdrop.
Idris Khan is an artist comfortable operating in the interstitial zones between translation and interpretation, absence and presence, and a more expansive apperception of art historical indexicality. His first one-person show in the United States, in Santiago Calatrava’s soaring wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum brings together multiple, distinct phases of the artist’s career that evince a restless search to capture the generic profundity of meaning in itself.
For her inaugural show at Peter Blum, Martha Tuttle presents an array of paintings in conjunction with the subtle sculptural presence of a variety of rocks and crystals, both within these and distributed discreetly throughout the gallery.
For Springs Projects second ever exhibition, Prototype 1.0, guest curator Tomas Vu has envisioned the inception and early stages of artistic exploration as a crucial point of creative fluidity. In his curatorial statement he declares: “The relationship between object-hood and origin—the notion of the prototype—can be engaged not only with the physical models but also (with) the modeling of ideas, concepts, and dreams.”
Kasmin has on view multiple manifestations of Lee Krasner’s mid-career solstices poised primarily in poles between Analytical Cubism-influenced tectonics and a more lyrical, Mattisean Baroque.
Osmosis’s sculptures are cobbled of fractured analogies for how materially removed we have become from the object world’s formerly resistant, concrete reality, and how the artist as scavenger of such a phenomenological ruin can imagine their version of what might be called a funky genre stability. Despite his works seeming at first to be composed of whimsical and fleeting non sequiturs, Osmosis is a profoundly considerate artist who exerts an uncanny capacity to make his ostensibly ersatz sculptures stick in one’s poetic recesses as substantially specific objects.
Making a mark upon the world can be seen as an act of hubris or a frank recognition of the limits of unique inscription, depending upon one’s philosophical inclinations. Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) realized the latter in his painting after having disproven to himself the moral efficacy of the former.
How does one derive and then develop and sustain a transcendent identity in abstraction? This is the overarching narrative in Richard Shiff’s monograph on one of the most inventive American abstractionists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul, published by the artist’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in 2022.
What is it like to be “of one’s time” and not? Leon Polk Smith was a prime progenitor of American hard-edged abstraction whose non-objective pedigree as a protégé of the painter and philanthropist Hilla Rebay, and subsequent track record of showing in the Betty Parsons and Egan Gallery early on, puts him squarely in the pocket of post-war American art ascendancy yet his legacy has subsequently remained a relatively independent part of that particular epic.
One of the singular accomplishments of Ed Ruscha’s long and varied career is to bring the hyperbolic image of the American billboard down to its actual size. Whether revealing the ass-end of the Hollywood sign or the lateral sprawl of Manifest Destiny down to its cinematic Sunset end, he’s served as sardonic witness to the country’s love/hate, super/under-sized relationship with itself.
One of the most effective ways an artist can model their own history is by fabricating it themselves. This can be done to then depart from such a fabrication, encapsulating both making and knowing in a unified creative gesture.
By Tom McGlynn
Raphael Rubinstein’s follow up to his influential 2009 proposal, Provisional Painting, is a fascinating study in skeptical digression. Throughout this entire book-length reprisal and reevaluation of his original thesis, Rubenstein expresses the kind of radical existential doubt that he also often refers to in the text as a patent impossibility in today’s “hip to that kind of trip” world.
Mary Jones’s newest paintings perpetuate the pas de deux she has previously choreographed between collaged and readymade photographic sources and bravura painterly passages. Her process typically integrates the two via a wide array of technical interventions, activating these elements into a series of staccato movements that refer to the aleatory nature of the “cut-up” but also to genealogies of expressionist painting.
Catherine Chalmers’s compelling multimedia exhibition We Rule has been culled from a ten-year commitment to interacting with over a dozen leafcutter ant colonies located in the Osa peninsula of Costa Rica. It includes high-resolution videos, drawings related to Costa Rican rainforest flora, and an intricate wall installation depicting a to-scale leafcutter colony wending its purposeful way through the basement floor galleries of the Drawing Center.
The crazy, ersatz glamor of Tom Sachs’s pure products could be considered in the context of commodity fetish if he hadn’t already recognized that we’ve passed that point of purchase long ago. In his novel Kingdom Come, J.G. Ballard summarized the dematerialization of coveted property into properties of pure exchange: “At the sales counter, the human race’s greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.”
One of the most salutary effects of taking in Fleming’s work (and his intentions for it) from the mid- 1960’s is to make present room for a visionary continuum that promotes a newly expansive sympathy for space- and the time it takes to experience it.
Katz’s individual portraits, figurative groupings, and landscapes form a highly personal and potentially arcane firmament of scenarios yet their forthright presentation in simplified motifs and bold color paradoxically make his deeply subjective journey available to all.
The curatorial correlation of these three painters offers an opportunity to make relative judgements about how each came to their individual conclusions on painterly touch.
For Mezcal vs. Pulque, Tiravanija collaborated with cooperativa 1050°, a collective of potters from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Chiapas, and led by Kythzia Barrera. The result was numerous vessels in the exhibition shaped by Margarita Cortés Cruz, Marisela Ortiz Cortés, and Gregoria Cruz Peralta from Río Blanco Tonaltepec, as well as Silvia García Mateos and Leopoldo Barranco in San Bartolo Coyotepec.
Milton Avery is an artist who, considering his long career, can’t be pinned to any one salient American style; yet it can be said that he midwifed many.
Richard Prince’s body shop of horrors here, a deconstruction of the American vehicle, is an elegantly orchestrated grand guignol of stock and customized hood forms as stand-ins for paintings with a few minimalist asides of free-standing parts and whole muscle car carcasses. And is there any American dream machine more representative of the restless substance of “American Spirituality” than the Fordist automobile? A pure product of the assembly line gone mad, the American car is the perfect prima materia from which Prince can ignite innumerable false starts.
Thornton Willis prefers the direct approach to painting. His constructive sensibility, a preoccupation with the architecture of space, lays out the basic proposition that painting is a vital projection of actual line, shape, and color. This keeping it simple makes his paintings eminently accessible to the viewer, whom he addresses as an existential equal.
One encounters Jim Osman’s sculptural assemblages as maquettes of the possible. His work’s potentiality is made manifest via his canny juggling of organic materials, tectonic engineering, and solid color—together with how those disparate materials cohere in highly animated theaters of ensemble character.
Over the course of his career Bochner’s art has evolved from a skeptical, anti-subjective conceptualism that valued an austere tactical reframing of aesthetic conventions, towards his more recent work, which appears a transparently subjective gushing of hyperbolic invective.
In these latest paintings, Westfall breaks freer from the asymmetric diagonal grid that has lent previous bodies of his work a kind of cock-eyed consistency and, by doing so, he amps up their vectoral dynamism. The grid isn’t completely banished in these newest works, it’s just on a wild walkabout.
The first Aegean farmers to unearth ancient Cycladic figures with their ploughs must have wondered at their articulate simplicity, as successive generations of artists have been inspired by Myron Stout's single-minded commitment to exploring similarly shaped (and similarly mysterious) forms in his paintings and drawings.
Since Gorchov’s most effective canvases tend to target the solar plexus of the viewer, the scale of each becomes significant. The closer the scale of his paintings to a torso, the more bodily tension they tend to exert.
Each of Nozkowski's paintings wind up as amalgams of geometric and biomorphic abstraction of varying scale, color, and pattern that appear to me to be an invented pictographic language analogous to one thing leading to the next.
In this recent, 416-page volume devoted to the artist’s life as seen through his portraiture, one gets the picture that Katz’s people constitute a distinct ecosystem of social relations. While the artist himself values gestural simplicity, his portraits, taken as a whole, make up quite a complex of civil manners.
The immediacy of Dawn Clements’s drawing acts as a seismic register of emotional states transcribing both real and imagined landscapes
Don Voisine's show at McKenzie Fine Art proves that the precise navigation of an abstract fold has the potential to unfurl multitudes.
Drawing from a commons of art history, popular culture, and personal narratives, the artists Molesworth has assembled for Feedback readily form a complex universal chora of band practice and social studies.
François Morellet’s life work represents the rakish progress of a cockeyed formalist. Though the artist was self-taught and sedentary, his various paintings, installations, and sculptures have nevertheless had a worldwide reach, largely due to their adaptability made possible by the artist’s inclination towards open-ended formal systems.
The work that’s never truly done for the scholar of art is to relate an intimate experience of the artist’s task without merely boiling it down to a referential precipitate. David Leiber, in his juxtaposition of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi, has managed to do this. By ignoring a strict art historic bracketing and shotgun-pairing these two modest masters, he proposes that their compulsive attention to subject and material might actually attain a sublime aesthetic concordance.
Rail Editor-at-large Tom McGlynn speaks with Sarah Crowner about the concept of “plastic memory,” how time functions for paintings, the use of glazed tile, and how a painting is experienced differently when a performer activates the gallery.
Otto Piene’s life’s work constitutes a grand example of the artist’s capacity for transforming the leaden memories of war and its ruinous aftermath into golden allegories of energy, light, and futuristic aspiration.
An important attribute that has contributed to Landfield’s independence as a painter is his assimilation of the long history of improvisatory painting and his dedication to physically exploring the recombinant potential of its basic pictorial presumptions.
The sculptural presence of these new works is carefully modulated by the wide vocabulary of glyph-like gestures that Lipke paints in colors that evoke, by turns, both the folkloric and psychedelic.
There are a number of portraits presented at Luhring Augustine in this tightly-curated survey of Auerbach’s paintings and drawings, which also includes some of his relatively larger landscapes. It’s a welcome opportunity to review up-close a number of mature works by an artist much more well known (as practically a national treasure, really) in his adoptive homeland in the UK.
Odili Donald Odita speaks with Tom McGlynn about his installations, the importance of drawing, and the politics of abstract art.
Pousette-Dart’s painting, in general, is decidedly uncool in that its aggressively-shaped, chromatically bold canvases adumbrate the liminal space between painting and sculpture with an irrepressible jouissance.
Not all artists consider themselves writers too, let alone critics. The poet Alice Notley, in reviewing a new collection of poems by Edwin Denby in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter of 1976, prefaced her review (not quite a disclaimer nor a benediction) by stating, “Poets can’t write criticism because what they understand about a poet they adore is what they themselves do or would, it is visceral—death to analyze? critics can’t write criticism because they never are knowing.”
The show is dominated by artists associated with what became known as the Washington Color School, including Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, and Gene Davis, whose careers benefitted from Clement Greenberg’s notion of “post-painterly abstraction.”
Schumann’s particular tack seems to be to rely upon the accumulated associative meaning shared in his readymade supports, a visual commons of sorts, to serve as a substrate for a pointed critique of the cultural clichés they rely upon.
Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe in which the uncanny bricoleur sensibilities of Jessica Stockholder, Franz West, Cady Noland, Martin Kippenberger, Isa Genzken, and Mike Kelley are melded into one super/sub consciousness of sculptural caprice named Rachel Harrison.
Albert Oehlen comes out of what might now be considered a tradition of anti-tradition in post war German painting. It was established by Sigmar Polke, one of Oehlen’s mentors at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, as a bricolage of pop iconography and pattern combined with bravura impasto and dissolute washes.
Perhaps more than any sculptor of his generation Serra has stared base materiality in the face, thereby forcing it to conditionally reveal its stock-still visage back. It’s a game of truth or dare that, in Serra’s case, he usually concedes with a poetic deference towards an unblinking counterpart: the secret to Serra’s work is not his intent to overcome gravity’s mortal indifference to the sculptor’s will, but to frankly acknowledge it.
At its very core, the intrinsic value of art—which can be disruptive, unpredictable, and at the very least challenging—has tremendous transformative and healing incentives. Whether it occurs at the first encounter or over time, the implications for the viewer, be they formal or emotional, are simultaneously simple and complex, generous and demanding.
In Aus dem Boden (From the Floor) at The Drawing Center, one is presented with the opportunity to delve deeply into the artist’s mode of conjuring up his symbolical derivatives with a series of drawings (not quite studies) for his larger paintings which are helpfully organized by the show’s curator, Brett Littman, into six groupings under the loose headings of absurdist drawings, architectural and landscape drawings, character studies, scenarios and figure drawings.
An artist isn’t motivated by need alone. One of the unique aspects of pursuing an artistic life is that the intent of such a life is driven by a personal vision and, if there is an economics of that desire, it is for “more vision.” Adolph Gottlieb believed, unequivocally, that to be an artist was the ultimate life choice. He also acutely knew, however, that from this choice, pragmatic necessities do, unavoidably, arise.
The boldly cliché title of this show is turned inside out in the introductory paragraph to curator Robert Storr’s catalog essay in which he clarifies that “art, by definition, is artificial and unnatural.
Insistent repetition is one way to measure time.
At a certain point in a career as long and accomplished as Alex Katz’s, one hopefully reckons to ask if that artist has begun to transcend themselves: where they become, in effect, “more themselves” (arguably a form of inner transcendence) or simply a representation of such.
It’s been 22 years since Willem de Kooning’s death at 93. His long and prodigiously productive career was lately most fully examined in a retrospective held between 2011–12 at MoMA.
If one were tasked with coming up with a phrase that would roughly characterize Katy Moran's way of painting, then "aggressive diffidence" might suit. In her case, however, it's a stance that projects a deeply powerful, perhaps even anarchic, energy.
By Tom McGlynn
In the pit of the post-war Modern European Theater lay the ruins of the School of Paris. Its various painterly edifices, a formerly fruitful mélange of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism had been shaken loose from their avant garde foundations by cataclysmic world events. This pit would, in part, become dominated by an aesthetic pendulum swinging between the capriciously whimsical and the patently absurd—between the promise of revived joy and the depressing reality of modern alienation.
Everyday events are deceptive in that their very ordinariness can remain transparent to us. It is a somewhat irrational human impulse to maintain a more exalted interval between the art of life and naked subsistence. Who hasn't harbored a secret wish, formed perhaps in the magical thinking of childhood, that we can be artists of our own lives, authors of our own destinies—that we can make "me" a world.
The most radical aspect of James Siena’s aesthetics, extending from his earliest works, is that he foregrounds the empirical impulse.
On the occasion of her third one-person show at Paula Cooper, I took the chance to talk with Tauba Aeurbach about her work and its laterally-cutting through of ideas and forms related to somatic being and its symbolic tissue.
In Stanley Whitney’s magisterially unfolding show at Lisson Gallery’s dual spaces in Chelsea, the artist presents a cycle of paintings and drawings that resemble a calendar of the conscious, a notational form of painting that checks off time as a series of vividly experienced partitions.
Will Corwin has chosen to work within this premise of archeological projection, and further, to ventriloquize its forms for a contemporary audience. So, what happens when an archeologically derived artifact is remade in the likeness of the artist’s own ontological projection?
Since the early 1980s the influence of Peter Halley’s writings, paintings, and installations has been widespread.
The quotidian fortune of being bull’s-eyed by a bird letting loose from on high supposedly augurs good luck, a sign that the splat was a chance operation. The deeper magic, of course, is that both pedestrian and the bird exist within a universal plane of consistency that somehow purposefully unites the bird’s flight with the walker’s groundedness. This may seem an odd analogy with which to introduce the prodigious sequence of painterly operations brought into intentional coincidence by Alex Katz over his long professional lifetime, yet it does concur with his stated notion of getting at a sense of “figure-in-ground” in his work.
Walking off of Great Jones Street and into Eva Presenhuber’s beautifully proportioned New York space hosting Martha Diamond’s most recent show of paintings, one can figuratively reconstruct the quotidian grandeur of an urban promenade in luscious abstract oils.
The question of poise comes up in different ways when viewing Barry Flanagan’s survey at Paul Kasmin Gallery: Strictly sculptural poise (from the ground to the plinth) but also conceptual poise, the balancing act that an artist needs to sometime effect to get their point across.
Al Held moved to Paris in 1949 where he was part of a loose-knit expatriate community of American painters that included Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis.
Barbara Rose’s conception of Painting After Postmodernism (PAP) seems to want to address, in Owen’s terms, the “static, ritualistic and repetitive” aspect of the postmodernist turn.
Coates’s paintings share a transhistorical affinity with Caspar David Friedrich’s scenes of ruined Gothic architecture set amidst scraggly oaks, yet are much less explicitly allegorical or connected to any specific theology.
I first met Leon Golub when the samizdat literary magazine I was co-editing, Ferro-Botanica (1980 – 1986) solicited an interview. Both he and his wife, the artist Nancy Spero, were quite generous with access to their studios, accommodating myself and my friends who at the time were just beginning to inscribe our mark in the New York art world.
I’d like to open our discussion with a statement from your essay “Form and Pressure,” in which you preface the scene from Hamlet directing the actors he brought to Elsinore for a play
Robert Ryman’s painting smolders with restrained, yet eccentric, color and gesture. His hand both withholds and idiosyncratically gestures with an open palm: the magic of an aesthetic disappearing act.
John Newman’s recent mini-retrospective of works presented at Safe Gallery is thickly populated with all sorts of biomorphic tropes but fortunately the assemble works escape the fate of the quick read of quirky stylizations offered in place of uncanny presence.
Alexis Rockman graciously welcomed me into his Tribeca studio on two occasions this fall to talk about his work, natural (and personal) histories, and the natural world of the 21st century. Hanging in the studio was a series of large-scale watercolors related to a recent project entitled “The Great Lakes Cycle,” which looks at the environmental history, degradation and resilience of that particular ecosystem.
The modern book is the product of a mechanical operation, the printing press, but as Internal Machine suggests, it can be considered a mechanism in and of itself.
For painters of this generation the war allowed for a break from the gravitational influences of Picasso and the School of Paris, the same break that would lend lift to the Abstract Expressionist ascendancy in New York.
Ben Wilson’s career as a painter parallels that of many others in his generation who began their creative investigations in the social realist idiom of 1930s America, ultimately evolving their own responses to Modernist abstraction in the post-war period.
Walking down the slot canyon of Vandam Street and into the mini-cavern of the Kate Werble Gallery and Michael Berryhill’s show of recent paintings can have the effect of discovering a fecund microclimate of crystalline flora and fauna nestled among the bleached, late summer-bones of lower Manhattan.
A work I always think about in these terms of a puncture is this piece I made in 2007, a huge, tangle on this spindly stand: in the studio, almost jokingly, it came to be called “Mr. Messy,” which is from a children’s book.
The Times is a cleverly capacious title for this large group exhibition, referring simultaneously to a multiplicity of historical periodizations and to a colloquial condensation of the New York Times. The works, like the title, encompass the specificity of individual perspectives, as well as the generalized verbal semantics and visual syntax of the printed commons.
If Alex Katz hadn’t so deftly invented himself, New York would have had to. Born in the city in 1927, he belongs to a remarkably self-creative generation, which has included such singular individuals as Frank O’Hara and Edwin Denby, whose urbane voices and visions became inextricably identified with the realigning echelons of post-war American upward mobility.
The image I retain is one more of a workshop of a freewheeling tinkerer than an eccentric abstractionist. At the time, I really didn’t know what to make of his work, as this small sampling was my first encounter with his approach to sculpture that seemed more like a non-approach to art.
The blatant poetry and phenomenological politics of the Arte Povera group in post-World War II Italy offered a corrective to what art historian Jaleh Mansoor has termed “Marshall Plan Modernism 1” or the encroachment of hyper-realized American financial and cultural capital into war-torn Europe.
In discussing Dan Walsh’s work here, perhaps it’s best to get the term “post-minimalism” figured from the beginning. There is an undeniable link in Walsh’s work to what artists and critics ranging from Mel Bochner to Rosalind Krauss helped to define in Minimalism’s 1960s heyday.
This current exhibition of his works not only represents the paintings actually made in New York, but its curator, Sabine Rewald, has used the city as a kind of compass with which to orient the viewer within the scope of the artist’s life and vision—one that changed throughout his life challenges and geographic dislocations.
When exactly did postmodernism begin? For that matter, has the question of when modernism began ever been resolved?
The logo-type signature that Stuart Davis affixed to all of his later compositions has the feel of an exuberantly but deliberately carved and cast-off orange peel. This shaped incorporation of the author with his works, which in many instances resemble a virtual junkyard of animate cast-offs, clearly signals Davis’s lifelong intention: to sublate an older genius of the exceptional subject into the oblivious, objective meander of the modern commons.
The first time I saw a grouping of Sadie Benning’s more recent paintings was at the Greater New York show at PS1 in 2015 – 16.
The title of this brief reflection is cobbled together from Philip Guston’s 1978 letter to Ross Feld, a younger poet and critic who had written appreciatively of Guston’s signal 1970 show, which marked his leap (or return) to figuration after years building a solid legacy of moodily lyrical abstractions.
