Art
Paintings We Need
In an era that celebrates celebrity, vulgar loudmouths, puerile provocateurs, selfie-addicts, and excessive materialists, Merlin James prefers subtlety over din, less rather than more.
John Yau
John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.
Art
Scrap Master
Imagine the wayward progeny of the textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers and the Mexican geometric artist Gunther Gerzso, experimenting with the wild palette generated by a computer, and you get a glimpse into what Martha Clippinger is up to.
Art
Crowd Control
Robert Birmelin’s paintings and drawings of a world going haywire bring together all sorts of visual possibilities, including multiple focal points, compressed juxtapositions of near and far, clearly defined details beside blurred and partially transparent passages.
Art
Stoic Beauty
At one point, while looking at Roy McMakin’s four identical green tables, I had the sudden urge to wipe the dust off one of them, except there wasn’t any dust.
Art
After the Storm, and Before
Marco Breuer has been making abstract photographs since the early 1990s. However, in contrast to Aaron Siskind, whose black-and-white photographs of walls were linked to the gestural paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly those of his friend Franz Kline, Breuer works with sheets of c
Art
Surveyor of Shadows
While writers have drawn a line, so to speak, between Soriano and Sol LeWitt, it seems to me that there are profound differences between their wall drawings. Whereas LeWitt’s self-contained works make no reference to the changes of everyday life, Soriano’s are based on time, light, and shadows cast
Art
Simple Pleasures
In his best works Cordy Ryman makes something visually arresting out of ordinary materials and paint — stuff you can buy in a hardware store.
Art
Better Late Than Never
The art world did not begin to seriously deal with Jack Whitten’s merger of formal inventiveness and emotional content until the past decade, when he entered his seventies.
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: Richard Hull in East Village, Chicago
There is something wonderfully incongruous about what Richard Hull calls his “stolen portraits.”
Art
The Beauty of Absent Bodies
Whoever thought that Carl Andre’s joyless, hug-the-floor sculpture was the logical culmination of Brancusi got it wrong. This kind of thinking strikes me as macho, competitive, and prescriptive.
Art
Archaic Futurism
In an interview that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail (May 2014), Joyce Robins explained that the title of her early painting “The Vly” (1975) is the Dutch word for swamp.
Art
Vanity, Thy Name Is Man
CHICAGO — I was hooked by the time I finished reading “Mr. John F. Kennedy and Mr. Kenneth Noland” (2016), a text-filled drawing written in pencil in large and distinct capital letters that reminded me of penmanship practice in elementary school.