Art
Martin Puryear Bears Witness
According to the wall text in the not-to-be-missed exhibition Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions at the Morgan Library & Museum, the artist was in “the Peace Corp in Sierra Leone, West Africa” from 1964 to '66.
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
Mary Heilmann Invites Us to Join Her in Arcadia
When I first wrote about Mary Heilmann for Artforum (January 1987), one thing I had in mind was the strong impression that her first great painting, “Save the Last Dance for Me” (1979), had made on me some years earlier, when I saw it at the Holly Solomon Gallery.
Art
The Necessary Insolence of Peter Saul
Peter Saul has an uncanny ability to seamlessly combine the hilarious and the hideous to great effect. In the middle of chortling at one of his wacky, indecorous paintings, you are apt to suddenly notice an odd and even disturbing detail.
Art
Slip, Sliding Away with John Walker
What do Richard Diebenkorn and John Walker have in common? When they sink their teeth into something, they aren’t likely to let it go.
Art
Squeak Carnwath’s Guilt-Free Zone Is Our Space
Squeak Carnwath’s exhibition, What Before Comes After, at Jane Lombard is the artist’s first with the eponymous gallery (formerly Lombard Fried) and her first in New York since 2000.
Art
Alberto Burri’s Challenge
The exhibition Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, currently at the Guggenheim Museum, is the first large-scale survey of this artist’s work in America since the museum’s previous survey in 1978.
Art
A Tantalizing Glimpse into the World of Barbara Rossi
There are five artists among the Chicago Imagists who did reverse paintings on Plexiglas between the late 1960s and the mid-70s: Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Ed Flood, Karl Wirsum and Barbara Rossi.
Art
The Beautifully Dressed Skeletons in Japan’s Closet
In a letter dated July 23, 1938, sent by the Japanese modernist poet Yone Noguchi to the Nobel Prize winning author Rabindrath Tagore — the first non-European to receive the award — Noguchi wrote the following justification for his country’s invasion of China, effectively ending their friendship:
Art
Recovering Abstraction: McArthur Binion’s Intimate Grids
McArthur Binion’s exhibition, Re: Mine, currently at Galerie Lelong stirred up a swarm of associations while I was looking at it, and the buzz did not die down after I left the gallery and decided to walk home amidst the late afternoon din of Manhattan traffic and people in a rush to get home.
Art
It Is What It Isn’t
It has been two years since Patrick Strezelec had his first exhibition of sculptures in New York in more than a decade.
Art
No Luxe, Calme, et Volupté for You, Baby
I was unexpectedly reminded of the wonderfully irreverent filmmaker Seijun Suzuki while looking at Dana Schutz’s painting, “Slow Motion Shower” (2015), which is included in her current exhibition, Fight in an Elevator, at Petzel.
Art
Paradise Regained, If Only for the Night
I had not seen Kyle Staver’s frieze-like clay sculptures before encountering two of them in Kyle Staver: Tall Tales, her current show at both Lower East Side spaces of Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.