Astrid Dick was told that she could not paint stripes because Sean Scully and Frank Stella have done so before her, a patently foolish statement.
John Yau
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His latest poetry publications include a book of poems, Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and the chapbook, Egyptian Sonnets (Rain Taxi, 2012). His most recent monographs are Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016), the first book on the artist, and Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). He has also written monographs on A. R. Penck, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before he began writing regularly for Hyperallergic. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
James Siena’s Radical Abstraction
The pleasure of Siena’s art arises from the tension between the overall image or the changing visual field and the individual units.
What Ha Chong-Hyun’s Painting Confirmed for Me
In his monochrome paintings, Ha Chong-Hyun recognizes that no matter how much we claim to reveal, something will still remain hidden.
Expressionism Turned Inside Out
Kyung-Me’s disciplined focus on minute details is inseparable from a vast grotto of feelings that she has channeled and kept in check.
Bernice Bing’s Search for a Unified Self
Bing’s search was not about style, being fashionable, or fitting in. It was about trying to acknowledge the multiple worlds one inhabits.
Reclining Men Reading Radical Books
Artist Pachi Muruchu merges his radical beliefs and resistance to colonialism with a complex sense of color and the moods it can conjure and inflect.
Phoebe Adams Memorializes the Ephemeral
Adams’s imaginative recreation of our everyday surroundings in her paintings is a reminder of how fleeting and transmutable the material world can be.
Long Live Life’s Little Moments
Han’s paintings are at once cryptic and straightforward, inaccessible and yet meticulously laid out.
Dean Fleming Paints the Fourth Dimension
Fleming’s geometric paintings are not the Minimalism of Greenberg and Judd, with their insistence on flatness and the elimination of space in painting.
How John Mitchell Shakes Up Portraiture
Mitchell is conscious of the many profound changes occurring in our society, and the urgent need to challenge old tropes.
Jim Weidle and Our Beautiful Despair
In his paintings of ground cover and gravel, Weidle touches on the despair that has replaced optimism in the United States, the sense that the future is bleak.
America’s Overlooked Landscape Painters
Masterworks of American Landscape Painting at the Center for Figurative Painting makes clear that the term “landscape” has been widely interpreted.