Art
In 1965, when Will Horwitt was 31, the world was opening up for him. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture, followed three years later by a Tiffany Purchase Grant. His work was beginning to attract the attention of heavyweight collectors and eventually it found its way into such major public c
Art
There’s something about Russell Tyler’s new paintings that just shouldn’t work. Elements reappear, with minor adjustments, from canvas to canvas, suggesting that the artist assembled his compositions according to a set of rules instead of entering each new process free of preconceptions. And yet, de
Art
Coverage of the visual arts in the New York Times hit a new low last weekend in its Arts & Leisure feature, “The Disrupters,” a roundup of interviews with “people who broke the rules” during 2013, “a year of cultural upheaval.”
Art
Memories fade. That’s the one good reason, as far as I can see, to compile an end-of-year list. It’s sometimes startling to retrace what attracted my attention over the course of a year; it is also instructive to determine where such a miscellany of shows fits in with ongoing areas of interest, and
Art
Last year I wrote an article called “What You Might Be Missing at MoMA,” which discussed the paintings exiled to the corridors of the Museum of Modern Art’s fourth and fifth floors.
Art
Inside the second floor galleries housing the contemporary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture called “Bruno” (1998–2012) stands in quiet command of the room. Made primarily of grass and cow intestines, its materials transform the human body into a mediation on mortality via the dige
Art
The recent resurgence of interest in contemporary painting has posited the unique object — especially the handcrafted, the slapped-together, and the aggressively tactile — as yin to neo-conceptualism’s yang, a raggedy-edged refutation of the factory-finished, the reproducible, and the overly cerebra
Books
Lucian Freud, as presented in the gossipy new biography, Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Grieg, lived for 88 years entirely guilt-free, which is a remarkable bit of pathology in itself, but especially so for the grandson of the man who tagged guilt as the glue holding civilization together.
Art
Leon Kossoff’s paintings can be counted among the vanishing breed of artworks whose comprehension is entirely dependent upon being in its physical presence.
Art
SUMMIT, NJ — Extended technique is a term normally applied to musical performance, but Migratory Marks, a show of seven wall works by seven artists, offers a thoughtful accounting of where extended techniques have pushed the boundary of what can be called a drawing, if there is in fact such a bounda
Art
Fabienne Lasserre makes objects she calls sculptures, but they could very well be paintings. They could also be remnants from a demolition site or detritus from a car bomb explosion.
Art
Once in a blue moon a show arrives that excuses the inexcusable — delivering actual aesthetic dividends from the tentacular global reach, bottomless capital and self-aggrandizing, macho scale endemic to the top tiers of the art game. Despite my expectations, that show turns out to be Richard Serra’s