Art
Judging Galleries by Their Pens: Chelsea Edition
Join me as I wander the streets of Chelsea and bring you the first in an as-yet-only-theoretical series of gallery pen reviews.
David Zwirner Gallery
Art
Suzan Frecon’s Patience Should Be Rewarded
The turning point for Suzan Frecon happened in 1989, when she saw the exhibition of the Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint: Secret Pictures at PS1.
Art
In London, Showcases for Self-Taught Artists’ Works
LONDON — Back in the 1970s, England, the home of such pioneering researchers in the outsider art field as Roger Cardinal and the late Victor Musgrave, played a significant role in calling attention to a subfield which, at that time, was still emerging within the art world’s international terrain.
Art
James Bishop’s Incommodious Beauty
I have been waiting to see a large selection of James Bishop’s paintings since the mid-1970s, ever since reading John Ashbery’s appraisal in a secondhand copy of Art News Annual 1966.
Art
Paintings on Paper, Abstract and Effervescent
For his solo show at Pace Gallery in 2010, Thomas Nozkowski made the decision to hang his work in pairs, with an oil painting on canvas board or panel alongside a related work on paper, setting up a contrast between density and light, slow and fast, rumination and riff. This comparison came to mind
Art
Doug Wheeler Builds a Horizon of Light
Coming from the deserts of New Mexico, where he lives in Sante Fe, Doug Wheeler’s visits to New York, seldom and auspicious, are greeted with the sort of awe usually reserved for mystics.
Art
Lights On: Doug Wheeler's Luminous Landscape
The dream of a completely immersive visual experience haunts modern art. The most famous example in painting, Monet’s Waterlilies installation, dedicated in Paris’s Orangerie in 1927, has behind it a rich history of popular entertainment: the panorama, invented in the late eighteenth century and a m
Opinion
The Yayoi Kusama Experience at David Zwirner in Emoji
Some things are simply better said in emoji …
Art
How to Look at Ad Reinhardt's Cartoons
At David Zwirner gallery right now, you can see an entire room of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. It's the first chance to do so in New York since 1991. But you can also see work for which the artist is lesser known — in particular, his cartoons.
Art
One Gallery, Two Very Different Artists
David Zwirner is currently showing solo exhibitions of Raymond Pettibon and Philip-Lorca diCorcia in his West 19th Street galleries. On the surface, Pettibon and diCorcia do not have much in common: the former creates punk noir drawings; the latter makes engaging photographs that dance between fact
Art
Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was p
Books
112 Greene Street: The Soho that Used to Be
“It is rather inspiring,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times, “that in an hour of political crisis this art (despite its makers’ eschewal of revolutionary postures) has arisen to make possible a project like 112 Greene Street.” The year is 1970. The place is Soho, until recently known as