Birds and airplanes soar, horses gallop, purples meet yellows, cerulean blues tango with magenta in geometric patterns, foliate designs crash into damask.
Author Archives: Debra Brehmer
Debra Brehmer is a writer and art historian who runs a contemporary gallery called Portrait Society in Milwaukee, WI. She is especially interested in how portraits convey meaning.
Posted inArt
Avedon’s Father, My Mother, and Processing Death
People say you should talk to the dying to reassure them, but words felt too pedestrian for this profound space of transition.
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Raphaël Barontini’s Slick and Stylish Historic Inversions
Interjecting the power poses of Western art history with heroic Black revolutionary figures from the Caribbean, Barontini’s work manages to be seductive yet also ceremonial.
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Tender, Yet Monumental Figures Crafted From the Tides
In Soles of My People, Khari Turner channels elements of Midwestern waterways into figures awash with global histories of triumph and struggle.
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The Last Tourist in Assisi
A writer reflects on Giotto, St. Francis, and what it means to have faith amid a pandemic.
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The Transcendent, Spiritual Fiber Art of Lenore Tawney
More than 40 textile works dating from the 1950s to her death in 2007, at age 100, float in the artist’s retrospective at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
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A Show of Saccharine, Seductive Greeting Card Paintings Sponsored by Deep Conservatism
William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Belle Epoque paintings suggest that anything can be bought as a balm against the harsh conditions and human expense required to build America.
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Envisioning Inclusive, Soulful Spaces for Artists
Can the terms of the art world really change from competitive creative genius to notions of collective power and proximity?
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Portraits that Feel Like Chance Encounters and Hazy Recollections
Nathaniel Quinn’s first museum solo show features work which suggests that reality might best be recognized by its disjunctions rather than by single-point perspective.
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Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist Depictions of Women’s Pain
Overshadowed in her lifetime by her famous husband, Max Ernst, the American painter gets a major retrospective in Madrid.
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Kiki Smith Makes a Subversive Sculpture of Alice in Wonderland at the Foot of a Skyscraper
Outdoor sculpture should not be an addendum but an interruption, an incongruity, a hole piercing the day’s fabric.