I do know that I had no intention of writing about the two exhibitions currently at Tibor de Nagy, John Ashbery & Guy Maddin: Collages and Richard Baker: The Doctor is Out, when I went to the gallery.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
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Beer with a Painter: Sarah McEneaney
I visited Sarah McEneaney at her home in the Callowhill / Trestletown / Chinatown North neighborhood of Philadelphia.
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The Wonderful World of Rudy Burckhardt
When it comes to the artistic community of New York City, especially from the late-1930s to the end of the 20th century, I can think of many writers, photographers, and artists who readily qualify as flâneur, but there is only who matched Charles Baudelaire’s description of the “passionate spectator.”
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The Other World Within This One: On Jane Freilicher
Jane Freilicher’s still-life paintings have a large-scale, panoramic quality associated with landscapes. Conversely, her landscapes focus on nature’s compactness and textures so that they convey the intimate solidities of still-life.
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Kathy Butterly and the Aesthetic Challenge of “No Two Alike”
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that ceramics are finally beginning to get some serious attention in New York. There is still a very long way to go, but the city does seem to be waking up to ceramics as an art form.
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Richard Baker Kicks Out the Jams
For the past decade, Richard Baker has developed two distinct but related bodies of work, one in oil and the other in gouache: the oil paintings depict tabletops covered with all sorts of printed ephemera and bric-a-brac; the gouaches are of book covers and, more recently, record covers.
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Enamored Magicians: The Hermetic World of Jess and Robert Duncan
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle presents a slice of the rich Northern California art world of the postwar years. Much of what is here is not “gallery art,” in a commercial sense, but art created by and for a small community of friends, colleagues, and lovers, rooted in a specific place and cultural moment.
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A Painter’s Sensuous Discipline
Consider two reds: a pure cadmium red medium — all fiery denseness — alongside a burnt sienna, equal in tone but utterly different in character: subdued, stoic, retiring. They jostle and shift, eager to separate. Plunk next to them a throng of blues, some deep and jewel-like, others brightly vacant. Leverage them with various greens; punctuate with small, dense patches of light and dark.
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An American in Paris: Shirley Jaffe’s Paintings from the 1970s
About her work, Shirley Jaffe has stated: “I want a certain tenseness, a congestion or a combination of forms in which none is stronger than any other. I’m interested in the idea of coexistence.” In her current exhibition, Shirley Jaffe: Paintings from the 1970s at Tibor de Nagy (October 17–November 23, 2013), there are six paintings, most of which were done around the middle of the decade. They remain fresh.
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How to Kiss the Sky: Kyle Staver’s Recent Paintings
You don’t see Kyle Staver’s dark, moonlit domains so much as become their invisible and unacknowledged witness and ally. In an age riddled with cynicism and laced with irony, she envisions a shameless alternative in which mythological figures, such as Daphne, Andromeda, Syrinx, Perseus, and a satyr, are at home.
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Cartoons of Paintings Which Aren’t Cartoons After All
Tom Burckhardt’s current exhibition of paintings done on cast plastic molds expands upon the show he had at Pierogi in 2011. It is not a huge change, but it is a significant one as it further clarifies the artist’s intention.
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Her Storybook Universe
To view Sarah McEneaney’s new show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery is to behold a storybook universe. Her colorful paintings sparkle on the wall like a diamond ring.