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.
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In an interview that appeared last month in The Brooklyn Rail, Joyce Robins, while addressing the relationship between abstraction and representation, pointed out: “’Vly’ is a Dutch word for swamp.”
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For anyone interested in poetry (not the same as verse); underknown art and artists; the artists and poets of the New York School after the death of Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara; collaboration; collage; a do-it-yourself spirit; the Lower East Side (particularly from the late 1960s until the late ‘80
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In her glowing review of Guy Goodwin’s previous exhibition at Brennan & Griffin, which appeared in the New York Times on March 8, 2012, Roberta Smith suggested that Goodwin belonged to the “tradition of raucous American abstraction,” which began with “Stuart Davis and George Sugarman.”
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FERNDALE, MI – Often placing his work along the periphery of an exhibition space, Michael E. Smith turns the boundaries between his work and its architectural setting into a porous membrane.
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From Ulysses and Arjuna to Sir Galahad, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers, Jack Kerouac and, more recently, Greg Smith, the quest (or road trip) for redemption, transformation, utopia, or just some very good peach-and-banana ice cream is a theme that spans world culture, from great literat
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As much as Howardena Pindell’s unstretched paintings and drawings share something with the Pattern and Decoration movement, or with monochromatic abstraction, color field painting, all-over painting, fiber art, the counting work of Roman Opalka, and the spot paintings of Larry Poons, what elevates t
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Since Julian Schnabel first gained attention with his broken plate paintings in the 1980s, he has been predisposed to working on found surfaces – animal skins, velvet, corduroy, sail cloth, tarpaulins, canvas flooring from boxing rings, wallpaper, navigation maps, flags, Kabuki theater backdrops, an
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Peter Dreher was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1932, the same year as his fellow countryman, Gerhard Richter. Like Richter, Dreher was an adolescent by the war’s end, an inheritor of an unwanted legacy, which haunts his work to this day. At the same time, Dreher might be seen as the antithesis of Ri
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CHICAGO –– I first saw Leslie Baum’s work in a sprawling group show, My Crippled Friend, at the Canzani Center Gallery (October 11, 2013–January 10, 2014), the main exhibition space of Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, Ohio).
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Initially I was skeptical, but Philip Hanson’s three paintings on the fourth floor of the Whitney Biennial got me to look and think again. The twelve paintings in his exhibition, I am a child of the Light, student of the Dark, at Corbett vs. Dempsey (March 21–April 19, 2014) convinced me.
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Joanne Greenbaum is hellbent on making each painting different from the ones preceding it. This was immediately evident when I walked into her first exhibition with Rachel Uffner Gallery, where she is inaugurating the gallery’s new large space with eight large paintings, all 90 x 80 inches.
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On the face of it, Gary Stephan’s paintings seem straightforward and austere. Done in acrylic, their viscosities of paint, range from striated, semi-transparent brushstrokes laid down with the same consistency as they span the canvas, to watery, semi-transparent irregular shapes, to solid geometric