Art
Chris Martin Finds a Muse in Amy Winehouse
LOS ANGELES — Paintings about painting are really about life, proposals for how it might be lived.
Chris Martin
Art
Two Ways of Making a Painting in the 21st Century
Ever since the beginning of this century, when Ruth Root got rid of her references to Philip Guston, she has gotten better and better. In her current show, Ruth Root, at Andrew Kreps, she has kicked out the jams, and the results are unlike anything else being done right now.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Chris Martin
A couple of years ago, I heard Chris Martin give a talk to Columbia MFA students. Rather than the standard artist’s slide lecture, Martin brought along his conga drums and a small band, a girl wearing a metallic dress and carrying a boom box, and a couple of people who tore sheets from a book of Ita
Art
Painting, Perception, and the Emphatically Handmade
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
Art
Under the Sign of the Gnome
The central thing that distinguishes Chris Martin from his forebears (Forrest Bess, Alfred Jensen, and Simon Gouveneur) is his meshing of visionary symbols and images derived from mass culture, particularly from the world of popular music. He has paid homage to James Brown, “the hardest working man
Art
Alone Among The Living and the Dead
I met Simon Gouverneur in the late 1980s, when I gave a lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Something that I talked about that afternoon prompted him to introduce himself — I am guessing it was Wifredo Lam. We sat in a drab conference room. For the rest of the afternoon, before I caugh
Art
Fiercely Independent Abstraction for Idiots
Janet Kurnatowski has run her gallery out of the ground floor of 205 Norman Ave. for the last seven years. There is something both welcoming and powerful about her modest space. The finished plywood and low ceiling are a welcome environment; a spacious hobbit hole for art. The owner's earthy dedicat
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, how a Caravaggio becomes "discovered" and evaluated, Christo gets the green light for Colorado, artists who seek out their harshest critics, Terence Conran, erasing a Chris Martin, escaping the digital world, Occupy Miami art schools, street art in Iran and is politics performance art?
Opinion
Painter Chris Martin Goes Really Big in DC
I'm as big of a Chris Martin fan as vlogger and writer James Kalm (aka painter Loren Munk), so the video he just uploaded on YouTube of Martin's new solo person museum show — his first — at the Corcoran Gallery of Artin Washington, DC, is a treat.
Art
The Art Spirits: The National Academy's 185th Annual
The National Academy Museum’s Annual Exhibition, often seen as the Whitney Biennial’s dowdy cousin, still privileges the rich traditions that bigger museums, galleries, and curators often overlook when they focus on younger, sexier media like video, installation, and social sculpture. This year, due