Thomas Micchelli

Post image for Flowers of Retrenchment: Anselm Kiefer’s Alternate History

Anselm Kiefer has scaled back, way back, from his preposterously overproduced previous solo at Gagosian, but with Kiefer we are always talking about relative degrees of gigantism.

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Post image for From Lynch to the Lynchian and the Dreams in Between

Hypnotherapy, a group show at Kent Fine Art, gives David Lynch fans a chance to revisit the iconic filmmaker’s alarming artwork a year after his solo turn at Jack Tilton. But that’s only one, conspicuous though it is, of its strengths. What really matters is the opportunity to experience a museum-quality exhibition that approaches the pitfalls of latter-day surrealism with as much intelligence and refinement as this one does.

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Post image for Single Point Perspective: Dürer’s Doomed Knight

Last week I wrote about several drawings and watercolors from the spectacular exhibition of works on paper by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) at the National Gallery of Art, leaving aside the show’s phenomenal selection of prints. I would like to return, however, to one engraving in particular.

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Post image for Running the Gamut: Trudy Benson’s Flamboyant Restraint

Still in her twenties with three solos under her belt, Trudy Benson has been garnering a lot of attention, and it’s easy to see why. Her raucously impastoed paintings, as luscious as they are jarring, are abstraction as sheer ebullience — ambrosia for anyone open to the innate pleasures of color, texture, line and shape.

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Post image for Dürer in DC: Some Observations on the Great Observer

WASHINGTON, DC — If you need one good reason to see the must-see Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, that reason would be the shockingly holographic “Head of an Apostle Looking Up” from 1508.

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Post image for The Writing on the Wall, the Paintings in the Basement

It’s not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between the aspiration and the goal.

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Post image for Standing on the Edge of Space: Painting as Noun and Verb

Oil on canvas. Evolving motifs. Line embedded in color. Compositions suspended between chaos and stability.

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Post image for The Object Is Not an Object: Cubism, Photons and Two by Fours

This week’s news of a major gift of Cubist works — possibly the most important in the world — from Leonard Lauder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art marks a landmark event for New York’s cultural heritage, but it also redirects our attention, however fleeting, on what the movement was about and what it means for art today.

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Post image for Alien Skins: Experimental Italian Painting of the 1960s

Sometimes the quietest and most unassuming exhibitions turn out to be the most fascinating, if not the strangest.

Tucked away on the third floor of Sperone Westwater’s Bowery building, there’s a show titled Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano. That’s it. No jazzy tagline like “Treasures of Proto-Arte Povera” or “Secrets of Euro-Neo-Pop.” Just Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano.

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Post image for “Revealing Soul” — Painting’s Cosmological Constant

What is the kernel of art? Does it lie in the form or subject, or in the shifting territory between the two? When do you manipulate the medium, and when do you follow its lead? Where are the parameters, if any, delimiting what art can contain? A painter like Ben La Rocco doesn’t ask these questions; he lives them.

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