Pylypchuk’s art has always been deeply engaged with the most painful parts of life, those that human beings tend to push aside or deny in order to get by.
Friedrich Petzel Gallery
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Searching for Humanity in the Not-Quite-Human
Throughout his career Jon Pylypchuk has confronted the most awkward and gut-wrenching parts of being human.
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Seth Price’s Digital Dissolution
Price works over his photographs with chemicals, polymer fluids, and powdered earth — decimating digital data through analog means.
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The Daily Practice of the Impossible
Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.
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Paint It Black, Blacker and Blackest
Joyce Pensato draws in charcoal and paints in enamel — dense, clinging soot and viscous liquid. For years her palette has been black, white and silver, though color is beginning to make an appearance in her recent paintings, mostly as splatters and drips. The drawing process is one of making marks, rubbing them out and making more marks, with line being the essential form. In the paintings, the line is made of enamel that initially appears to have been applied quickly, though its varying densities and its field of drips and splatters makes it clear that it wasn’t done in a single shot. In both drawing and painting Pensato is committed to finding the linear form that captures her subject matter, be it Homer Simpson, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Batman, Groucho Marx, Felix the Cat, toy clowns, or not-so-cuddly monkeys.
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Two Artists, One Winner: Lisa Yuskavage and Nicola Tyson
Lisa Yuskavage and Nicola Tyson have solo shows three blocks from another in Manhattan’s Chelsea art-borhood. Both focus on the appearance of the figure and how it responds to or appears in certain situations, both real and imagined. The results could not be more different.
