Jennifer Samet

Art

Painting on Message at the 2017 Whitney Biennial

This year, the Whitney Biennial includes plenty of painting. And — for the most part — the painting is on message. It’s eccentric figuration with political content.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Jennifer Coates

Coates’s recent work depicts food: spaghetti and meatballs, sprinkle cookies, and s’mores. Her work is about matter and viscosity, but it is also rooted in grid-like structures, repetitive mark-making, and very sophisticated paint handling.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Craig Stockwell

Painters who lived and exhibited in New England, like Jake Berthot and Porforio DiDonna, are highly represented. They, like Stockwell, have straddled the line between tough material abstraction, nature, and the figure.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Tal R

Tal R talks about “watching” paintings — not just looking at them. It might be a language tic, but it also feels specific.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Alex Katz

“It’s been my most productive summer ever,” Alex Katz declares. “The real work is here, though,” he tells me, unrolling pounce paper to show me his preparatory drawings. “I want to go even bigger,” he says.

Art

Nazis, New York, and Max Beckmann

What New York gave Beckmann was not superficial subject matter, but inspiration in the form of energy.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Billy Al Bengston

“Practically everything I do takes ten years for people to get,” Billy Al Bengston says — perhaps a reason why several of his 1950s and ‘60s exhibitions have recently been re-staged.

Art

“Vulnerability Could Be the New Stoic”: Paintings by Allison Schulnik

In Allison Schulnik’s hands, paint becomes matter and subject becomes object. Her paintings are about a continual state of flux: morphing, dripping, and melting.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Katherine Bradford

“Jen! Welcome to Maine!” Katherine Bradford exclaims brightly as she spots me crossing the street.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Enrique Chagoya

I visited Enrique Chagoya in his Stanford University studio when classes were out for the summer. The bucolic fields outside the building were quiet, other than the rustling of tree branches, and a group of swallows and a hummingbird flying near the roof.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Charles Yuen

Charles Yuen’s home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is comfortably domestic and suburban in feeling, which somehow surprises me, after having seen his zany and sardonic paintings earlier in the year at Studio10 in Bushwick.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Ridley Howard

I fell in love with Ridley Howard’s painting when I saw his 2014 exhibition at Koenig & Clinton Gallery. The show, as a whole, created a world that one rarely sees in contemporary art: romantic, refined, delicate, and impeccably crafted.