Mystified as ever by the rise of Josh Smith whose work resembles the efforts of a tipsy van Gogh in an art bar, seeing this show, my inner critic is confronted with mostly disagreeable choices.
Josh Smith
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Creature Discomfort: Art in the Cycle of History
It makes sense, at this most critical moment, to take a serious look at the art of the 1980s, its political fury and layered poetics, as an anchor in the storm.
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A Hardworking, Sincere, and Studiously Inept Painter
“Josh Smith: Sculpture” is how the sign reads. Yet behind it is a conservatively installed exhibition of drawings, conventionally framed and tastefully spaced on Luhring Augustine’s neutral white walls.
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Reviewing the Responses to MoMA’s Divisive Painting Survey
As news of art fairs and Bjork took the spotlight earlier this month, I lingered on the Museum of Modern Art’s The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, up through early April.
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The Death of Painting: All-New, 2014 Edition
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, the new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, prompted thoughts of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, though I’m not sure how much acceptance there is in the end.
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The New Old Logic of Abstraction
The great thing about the outgrowth of exhibitions showcasing and examining emerging contemporary abstract painting is that the novelty is starting to wear off.
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Nada is Miami Beach’s Lower East Side
Tired of all the chatter about Nada being the next big thing, I decided to see if this year’s display would be everything the PR and press promised it would be.
Honestly, it was. Even if the solo artist booths in Richelieu hall were generally a little dull and pedantic, the Napoleon hall was filled with a diverse range of work from galleries that obviously loved what they do.
I found the painting at Nada particularly strong and it was nice to see a love of color in so many that ranged from large-ish-scale abstractions to small intimate pieces with rich surfaces. The tread for most of these paintings is that they tended to be done in a gestural mode of representation veering towards the abstract, but I can live with that.
