Art Review

WARP

Millree Hughes — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:32:51 +0000

WARP Millree Hughes December 2, 2025 - 17:32

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

Trespasser no. 4, 2025, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 96 inches

KARIN DAVIE: It Comes In Waves

Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Through 20 December 2025

Karin Davie is famous for a suite of extraordinary paintings that she showed in the 00s. They seemed to be her last word on the Stripe Painting, which had been her subject since the early 90s. She cut the stripes loose from the edge, and they recoiled like heavy rubber bands. These large abstract works consist of wildly interweaving fist-sized strokes on a coloured ground. The lines are painted wet on wet, picking up colour as they travel, each brush stroke loaded in such a way as to imply weight and volume and evidence of a light source or sources hitting the surface of the line. She never lets you forget, however, that this is paint speaking the formal language of Art.

In her dynamic new show at Miles McEnery, the stripe is back with a new set of instructions. The show consists of two sets of glorious paintings. Two red wave-like paintings, made up of two joined canvases, and a second group of wavy paintings, each in a predominant colour. They are unusual colours that can appear natural, artificial, or both. All of the second set has a divot cut into the top in the middle of the canvas, as if a giant's thumb has pushed into the picture plane.

"Trespasser No 4" is a particularly lovely golden-haired painting. Lines move horizontally in sensual gestures from one side to the other with a kink in the middle, so that by the time the last line is made, there is a groove or path running vertically through the canvas, finishing at the cut-in divot at the top. As the line moves, it picks up lighter or darker versions of the prevailing colour. The way that darker tones gather in parts of the image makes me think that the shadow of clouds has been cast on Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows." The line sometimes stops firmly before the edge or runs on as if it didn't exist. Drawing attention to the formal limits of the canvas and then sometimes totally ignoring them.

Words have worked for Davie in the past. Not in a literal way that say "container" did for Ross Bleckner with his paintings of the '90s made in the shape of urns. But her '90s pieces were "wavy" Davie's and sometimes "curvy" Davie's. But after the '00s, she began looking inside for inspiration rather than at how she looked from the outside.

"Abstractionists see no more sections, no divisions between different sections of reality, and this is not surprising since reality has been transferred from the outside to the inside of the artist, where experience is all one, and everything exists on the same plane." - Guillaume Apollinaire

Strange Terrain no. 5, 2025, Oil on linen, 60 x 105 inches

A more internal perspective persists in the Red Wave paintings. In "Strange Terrain No. 5," we are reminded of both the sea and the body. These are gorgeous paintings, but she doesn't let you just fall into fairy-tale beauty. She brings you back to the real condition of the body. At one point, a cut opens up between the lines and drips over the undulating surface.

There's a carnal shadow. It's not only a billowing pomegranate sea at dusk, but it's also viscera heaving with the breath, the tissue that covers the ribcage.

Both Strange Terrain paintings are composed of two canvases. It means that when she is painting the horizontal stroke, she has to stop and then continue the line again on the next canvas. This deliberate obstruction asks the question, 'Is the action still authentic if it is made a second time?'

Or in this case, if the line is continued.

It harks back to one of her earlier diptychs like "Ummm….#1 & #2," 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Where a curvy form covered by stripes had to be repeated in the second painting.

Ummm….#1 & #2, 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Oil on canvas over shaped stretcher. Each canvas: 90 X 60 in

This emphasis on the performance side of painting reminds me of the difference between the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan. It didn't matter whether Jimi was playing with his teeth or behind his back; you took the notes he played to be an authentic response to the music. But in a performance by T Rex at the Rainbow music venue in the early '70s, Marc ran his tambourine up and down the neck of the guitar until he finally ejected the tambourine into the audience. It really didn't matter what the sounds coming out of the speaker were; it was about the performance of the action. Marc was no slouch as a guitarist either, but he sometimes used the guitar as a prop as well as an instrument.

While I recognize that this example is not exactly the same thing, because Karin very much cares about what the painting looks like. I'm just using it to make a comparison between how glam was much more playful with the rock music form in a way that is similar to how the post painterly abstract artists used Minimalism. The exact same thing would be if Marc played an impassioned solo and then reproduced it, immediately note-for-note. That would be very Karin Davie.

Karin's work is about aesthetics and poetry. She asks: can a painted performance be authentic? Is the edge of the canvas the end of this particular state described by the painting? At the same time she's alluding to places and things in an optical way. This line casts a shadow, this one emanates light. This picture reminds you of waves. Consequently, the image seems to shift constantly between different states.

Add new comment

Makers Mark

Millree Hughes — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:51:41 +0000

Makers Mark Millree Hughes October 31, 2025 - 21:51

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

Stretch, Hold, Release
Picture Theory at 548 West 28th Street, NYC

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition." - Walter Benjamin

AI is not regarded as a tool by artists the way the tools of the past were: burnt willow sticks, polished lenses, and Photoshop, because it’s seen as a threat to the artist’s existence.

Walter Benjamin's "Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is in full flow. Music, images, and books are being created to order by producers. Soon, just as Spotify is making its milquetoast music, Netflix wants to generate ambient, half-digested TV using AI and other means. It will be created according to the digitally tracked needs of the public in the service of the corporation. Mechanical Reproduction intends to obliterate the ‘who’ of art making.

Craft-based art returns the focus to the object—how it was made, where it was made, and by whom it was made.

At Picture Theory, the gallerist Rebekah Kim has curated a show of craft-based art called "Stretch, Hold, Release."

The relationship of the artist to where they are from is significant here. Unhitching art from its tethering post of origin has been useful for corporate-made content. It wants to make a global product from a global culture. The specifics of the place make it harder to control.

Luis Emilio Romero paints Guatemalan fabrics, going as far as to imitate the raised stitch in paint. They remind me of Scottish Tartan, '60s hard-edge abstraction, and city plans. However, here, all the shapes and colors that comprise a traditional woven piece can refer to animal, plant, or cosmological patterns. It’s a metaphor for the Mayan worldview.

Lior Moran is an Israeli artist, raised in a country partly populated by people who came there because they had to hide their religion, now caught in a terrible darkness where the objectives on both sides are hidden. He takes found objects or makes sculptures that he hides under a velvet canvas. He shaves off the protruding planes, creating an inverse shadow. He uses twilight colors in his work. They are then bound along the side with a flesh coloured belt that sometimes has a buckle, like a bundle wrapped for a hurried exit.

The multiple handles and thick knotted rope, the little pinafores that she makes for her examinations of Peruvian pottery, draw attention to the utilitarian character of Terumi Sato’s own Japanese ceramic traditions.

Elisa Lutteral is an Argentinian artist born in New York. She is represented here by hanging lengths of woolen fabric with a glove at each end. In the video, the glove-wearing performers are positioned in a specific location from the camera's perspective. The resulting braid is achieved by their movements around each other. It’s an improvised group performance of one of the first crafts that we learn as children.

JaLeel Porcha’s contribution is the least didactic in the group. It’s a deep-pile hanging rug. It appears to represent a clearing in the woods, featuring two black children and a pond, perhaps. He’s influenced by the illustrators of classic American children’s books. The nostalgic quality is enhanced by being a knitted piece, which adds an ironic element to its shadowy mood.

An object that has only been created by hands and shows ´where’ and ‘when’ it is made and ‘what’ it is made from is crucial to understanding ‘what’ it is. Without these interrogatives being answered, it probably isn’t Art at all.

Add new comment

The New York Art World Rebooted

Mary Hrbacek — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 01:54:55 +0000

The New York Art World Rebooted Mary Hrbacek October 9, 2025 - 21:54

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

Nathaniel Mary Quinn Study for Grange Copeland, 2025 Oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel 18 x 15 inc

Gagosian Gallery: Nathaniel Mary Quinn - Echoes from Copeland (9/10–10/25/2025)

Hauser and Wirth: Ambera Wellmann - Darkling (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Company: Ambera Wellmann - One thousand Emotions (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Marianne Boesky Gallery: Celeste Rapone - Some Weather (9/4 – 10/18/2025)

Nathaniel Mary Quinn explores personal, family, and historic narratives in twelve intense new oil and oil pastel paintings on linen, where he uncompromisingly excavates pictorial planes in his search below surfaces for the underlying, intrinsic, emotionally charged forms that spur and motivate his life and his art. His meticulous, exquisitely composed vision displays a strong formal connection to the methods employed by Francis Bacon, while also delving deeply into the visceral underpinnings of the personalities he constructs and describes. This is the primary focus of the complex, highly empathetic structures that build the psychological force that each image conveys. Quinn’s mastery of the paint medium and its many possibilities provides a level of expertise that has long been scarce in contemporary art. The intimate works are forcefully compelling and meaningful. Their complexity draws viewers into the process of painting, assaulting their senses to make them experience otherwise subconscious or unexpected feelings.

Quinn’s ability to submerge the main subjects in a revealing context accentuates their truth on a number of levels in their attempts to escape racism, in their efforts to flee poverty in rural and urban America, and in their desire to put the slave heritage that haunts their quest for freedom and equality behind them. His search for self-realization involves a closer look at the circumstances of his dysfunctional family members. The hope and possibility of redemption is inspired by the novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” by Alice Walters.

Quinn’s dynamic blue, red, and yellow hues activate the central themes of his plots to a level of power that sensually engulfs the viewer. The combination of black and white within the maze of the facial forms and features sets the stage for deep introspection and personal tandem feelings one may relate to in one’s own family history and experience. Quinn explores the emotional pain frequently released through the painting process by creating fierce shapes and expressive forms that may function as a healing measure. One can only appreciate the artist’s special ability to transform disturbing-looking structures into unusual embodiments of beauty that grow from facing harsh realities. His distinctive “paint-drawing” technique enlivens the authority of each vignette, where scenes and backdrops express a graphic sensibility that is counterbalanced by his painterly interpretation of the facial features and specific body parts. The show is unique and powerful.

Ambera Wellmann, Mother, 2025 Oil on linen 45 x 49 in 114.3 x 124.5 cm (AW152) Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Ambera Wellman’s two current shows in New York overlap in their visual narratives with the “One Thousand Emotions” coming in as an edgy depiction of the destructive forces in former times aimed against women who are discerned to defy societal conventions. In “Darkling,” her seven oil on linen paintings feature masked congregations who have gathered, as in James Ensor’s masked assemblies, to commiserate, to support, or to experience a sense of communal dread that foreshadows the impending apocalypse. Her painting style is semi-representational, not realistic, which provides a successful vehicle for her phantom-like reveries. Wellmann’s visions of the naked and departed, in a feast that hints at an interim stage of the afterlife, seem to refer to a frightening existence devoid of the order to be found in everyday life. These specters and hallucinations relate to the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch projected forward into the contemporary mind.

Wellman is one of the present-day artists to visualize and express the unsettling implications of the current world turmoil. The artist’s beautifully rendered works express emotions of terror and foreboding. She intimates in the painting entitled “Siren,” that our original human genesis as sea creatures will become our endgame. Wellmann delves into her personal philosophy to explore the path to oneness with the Universe; her meditations hint that through the release of the ego, we will achieve that unity. She explores personal, societal, historical, and philosophical ideas in forceful, intricate visions set in fraught outdoor settings and in ethereal evocations of mystical, sensual inner worlds.

Wellmann’s show, “One Thousand Emotions,” displays six oil on linen paintings that are connected by photographic and drawn wall imagery in installation formats. Her emotionally charged images are steeped in nudity, sexuality, and flirtation with the spiritual dark side. Wellman evidently intends to conjure the apparitions of disobedient women from dark, unstable ages, who were persecuted as witches and executed as dissenters. Death is depicted as a metaphor for chaos and change. Wellmann has the courage to explore subjects that spark our fears and resistance to the reality that life is transitory, changeable, and fleeting. Her provocative, intriguing work represents a committed intention to bring universal meaning and philosophical content into the contemporary art arena.

Celeste Rapone Poised, 2025, Oil on canvas 32 x 28 inches 81.3 x 71.1 cm

Celeste Rapone’s large-scale oil on canvas paintings, presented in her current show “Some Weather,” provide a clear vision of believable, ultra-personal imagery that describes a quotidian life every viewer can relate to. In an unusual perspective, Rapone infuses her contemporary imagery with art historical spatial interpretations that evoke the work of Cezanne and Modigliani. Her anatomical distortions accentuate an arm around a shoulder or a female figure shuddering as wind blows her hair under an inadequate umbrella. She piles figures on top of each other in what appears to be the morning after an all-night drinking party. Figures in a hot tub swelter red against glowing white bubbling water. Rapone has a very European vision of the figure, where elongated legs or enormous hands call the viewer's attention to the distorted, accentuated anatomical forms. Her colors are muted, sophisticated, moody, and convincing. The facial features seem morose and reserved, not exuberant. A figure wearing a LOVE T-shirt sits with a girl, suggesting the pair is a couple. There is a sense of orderly melancholy in this vision that is quietly believable. The artist paints beautifully; the subtle tones distinguish these paintings. By their extreme introspection, they create a calming effect that allows the viewer to focus on the personalized, elongated distortions. The group formats allude to unsurprising ordinary relationships present in the everyday lives of the majority of people, which provide a sense of community in life. The elegant rendering of the forms puts these works in a category of their own, as a formal achievement well beyond the usual depiction of common objects and normal people. The delicately modeled, unique figures set in distinctive milieus are poetic and mesmerizing.

The three exhibitions reviewed above, as well as the solo shows “Yuan Fang: Spaying” at Skarstedt and Austin Martin White's “Tracing Delusionships” at Petzel, indicate that the windows in Art have been opened to allow fresh air to circulate. The New York Art World seems to be diverging from past constraints, which have long determined the style of art that holds dominance here. There is a refrain from a song from 1963 by British folk-pop duo Chad and Jeremy called “Yesterday’s Gone.” Its sentiment expresses the space and opportunity for the freedom to flourish that is enabling a new trajectory to flow in the Art World. Unrest and chaos in society often spur creativity. I think this is an upbeat time to encourage and foster the daring types of individualized art that are entirely acceptable, very marketable, and above all exciting and engaging.

Add new comment

Art Is Funny, Sometimes

Dom Lombardi — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 01:47:49 +0000

Art Is Funny, Sometimes Dom Lombardi September 7, 2025 - 21:47

Topics

Art Review

Tags

group show

"You Think That's Funny?"

September 6 to November 16, 2025

Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden

D. Dominick Lombardi, curator and participating artist

Cary Leibowitz, Painting is Not Dead? Painting is Dead? (1998), marker on found photographs, 10 x 16 inches, 11 x 17 x 1 inches framed

Humor in Contemporary Art is a funny thing. Seriously. An exhibition with humor as its specific theme is not something you often see in galleries or museums. There have been exceptions over the years, where artists like Saul Steinberg, who straddled the two worlds of fine and commercial art with his many brilliant The New Yorker Magazine covers; and the outlandish works of Marisol Escobar and H. C. Westermann who have their own unique brand of humor, can be seen in museums throughout the world–artists that would not have been as successful without the recognition of their wit and humor. Today, some form of humor, albeit on the darker side, can be experienced in the contemporary works of numerous well-known artists such as Carroll Dunham, Sarah Lucas, Barbara Kruger, Peter Saul, Erwin Wurm, and last but definitely not least, Maurizio Cattelan, who all have varying levels of dark humor in their creations.

Maurizio Cattelan, A Perfect Day (1999)

The title of this exhibition, "You Think That's Funny?," comes from an email conversation I had with Mike Cockrill, one of the artists in the exhibition, who has been toying with the limits of humor in art since forever. He sees humor and the extent of what can be publicly tolerated as a satisfying challenge. He, like many of the artists in the exhibition, presents us with something to make us laugh privately, but maybe feels a bit uncomfortable when expressed in the public realm.

The artists selected for this exhibition have accepted the fact that there is humor in their art. Using a variety of media, styles, references, and messaging, they have all created narrative art that should make visitors smile, at the very least, or even laugh out loud. What is also important to note is the substance beyond the initial humor. Humor only goes so far, so while these artists have your attention, you can appreciate the abilities and techniques used in the fabrication of their very intriguing work.

(left) Todd Colby, To the Future (2024), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches; (right) Peregrine Honig, Wonky Donkey (2006), pen and ink, Gum Arabic, pigment on Strathmore, 10 ½ x 10 ½ x 1 ½ inches, all images courtesy of the artists

Todd Colby uses words and images to create weirdly symbolic, diaristic mixed media collages, paintings, and sticker commentary that all have a substantive impact. As a poet, writer, and visual artist, Colby blends an endless series of investigative thoughts and images ignited by keen observations that, when added to a common surface, shed a humorous light on the often brazen and hard-to-bear new realities in our current sociocultural and political landscape. Peregrine Honig also utilizes words and images to create humorous vignettes; however, in this instance, Honig's art is more specific and far more intimate. Working with pen and ink, Gum Arabic, and pigment on paper, Honig presents previously innocent stuffed animals in far more mature social situations that many adults can easily relate to. In doing so, humor is maintained, but in a very different light, whereby the source of one's distinct personality traits, positive and negative, can be traced back to one's early days at play.

(left) Rita Valley, WTF (2019), mixed materials: silk brocade, vinyl, satin, paracord. 48 x 47 inches; (right) Norm Magnusson, Horse (2025), archival computer print, 24 x 18 inches

Rita Valley is fed up with the state of our union. Utilizing her skills with fabric and fringes, Valley gets right to the point as she confronts the viewer with familiar terms of dissent. Using fancy patterns, shiny surfaces, and heavily textured accents, Valley projects a passionate belief system that is being attacked on all sides. However, at first glance, the feeling one may get from her art is one of a universal, reactionary type of humor, pulling the viewer in, as they think more deeply about what is haunting their own worlds. The art of Norm Magnusson reveals a multi-pronged approach to humor that varies between county fair controversy and lowbrow art bombs to more serious issues regarding our collective state of mind. Magnusson is a master at pairing words and images, contrasting references and recognising timely subliminal links that creep up on you unexpectedly. Magnusson constantly reminds us to stay engaged and to look at the world with both delight and suspicion.

(left) Judy Haberl, Sausages (2020-25), jewelry, pearls, sausage casings, acrylic medium, sizes variable; (right) Bret DePalma, Art Ham (2024), acrylic, collage on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Judy Haberl grew up in a home where food was often extremely experimental, as her father advised NASA on their "food in space program…". Her family ate "...dehydrated foods to test for edibility," which were usually godawful, as these early experiences with laboratory food still influence her art to this day. Included in this exhibition are her humorous sausage casings filled with faux jewelry, and witty Baby Cakes made of colored Hydrostone, as she reminds us that it's all getting too far afield from wholesome whole foods. Bret DePalma pushes his narratives well past reason. Nothing fits, yet it all works once his paintings are completed. No color, perspective, symbol, or representation is off the table, as he weaves through uncharted spaces that sweep across his mind. The humor, which is very complex and layered, begins slowly and tentatively as the viewer comes to terms with what is in front of them, as they wonder where all this wizardry comes from.

(left) Susan Meyer, Maggie, 2025, wood, foam, acrylic, Apoxie Sculpt, paint, 2 x 3 inches; (right) Jeff Starr, Landolakes (2024), acrylic, marker on paper, 15 x 13 inches

Susan Meyer's sculptures have a B-movie type futuristic look to them that feels timid in one way and grandiose in another. A bold mix of emotions that gives her work a unique sort of humor that is subtle but effective. This is not to say that there is no depth here; there is, and much of it, as exemplified by elements of High Modernism as a distinct placeholder, especially with respect to the aesthetic, while the presentation of materials in their curious shapes and colors adds contrasting notes of frivolity and seriousness. Jeff Starr creates mixed media paintings that feature multiplanar realities. These planes, which could not be more different, shift back and forth between an idealized 'real world' and an imagined astral plane that transcends what is considered normal processing of space and time. This overlapping of universes forms a visually halting transition, perhaps the way alien space travelers may perceive our world on their terms, focusing more on unknown elements we can not see, while turning the whole thing into an absurd visual conversation.

(left) Jim Kempner, The $6 Million Dollar Banana Split, video, running time 5:33; (right) Cary Leibowitz, Cubism? (1998), marker on found photograph, 8 x 10 inches, 11 ¼ x 9 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches framed

Jim Kempner, a well-known, decades-long art dealer on the corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue in New York City's Chelsea District, is one of the more colorful individuals on the scene. A passionate purveyor of prints, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, Kempner sees the humor in his daily reality and does something about it. His seven-season video series, The Madness of Art, is a much-needed breath of fresh air, a break from the austere atmosphere that many NYC galleries often project when interacting with the general public. Cary Leibowitz uses words masterfully, and we never know if he is being cheeky or in the middle of a crippling crisis. Or is it both? Either way, Leibowitz's art will forever stir things up by disrupting the viewer's typical train of thought. Whether it's cute stuffed animals, symbolic ceramics, intricately cut placards, pennants, paintings, shopping bags, or an all-out outdoor installation, Leibowitz leaves us with an indelibly blazing, bold, and unexpected mark on many things, searingly sociopolitical to the brilliantly benign.

(left) Mike Cockrill, The Door (2013), acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches; (right) Mary Bailey, Pox - Let's Go Viral (2025), wood, acrylic paint, 5 x 2 ½ x ⅞ inches

Mike Cockrill's art portrays feelings of hopelessness, futility, ecstasy, or enlightenment. Using easily recognizable figures like clowns and the typical office worker stuck on a never-ending wheel to nowhere, Cockrill strikes at the heart of the circumstances he presents in ways that will make the viewer smile or laugh at first, until the weight of the situation breaks through. After that, it's back to the humor in a continuous cycle of responses that would never be as potent if not for the clever, straightforward, high-quality art of Cockrill. Mary Bailey's primary medium is painted or scribed wood that, when messages or symbols are added, has anywhere from unique tinges of Surrealism to a persuasive form of Pop. In her most recent series of symbolic cigarette packages, Bailey sends powerful socio-political statements utilizing her own brand of dark humor to make her point, concerns that are growing more and more troubling every new day. In the end, Bailey dives deep into realities that are best served with a little humor, or all is lost.

(left) Cathay Wysocki, Expeller of Erroneous Thought (2022), acrylic, collage, sand, glitter, beads on canvas 20 x 16 inches; (right) D. Dominick Lombardi, CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), sand, papier-mâché, gesso, acrylic medium and objects, 11 1/2 x 12 x 9 inches

Cathy Wysocki makes art that swings back and forth between fear and fantasy. Wild colors and crazy narratives somehow make everything oddly copacetic. The limits of which are stretched to the breaking point in every imaginable way. Hideous/Beauteous comes to mind here as Wysocki weaves her way through highly textured surfaces where emotions run raw and rampant, propelled by a limitless and lively aesthetic. Very often in my paintings and sculptures, humor is presented as a prompt or a reward for looking at the art. With the sculpture CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), I take a shot at the art world in general, and Damian Hirst specifically by referring to his most famous early work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) where a tiger shark is suspended in a clear glass and steel tank filled with a 5% solution of formaldehyde.

Adam Niklewicz, ERWIN (2024), cardboard box, rubber boot, 30 x 12 x 14 inches

Adam Niklewicz joins the fun with ERWIN (2024), an homage to the outrageous sculptures and photographs of Erwin Wurm. Like Wurm, Niklewicz often pairs absurdly unlike objects in penetrating ways to twist, confuse, and delight–it's physical comedy in 3D. Yet, there is something deeper and darker looming in the unconscious here. It's called unencumbered imagining, free association, the ability to literally think outside the box and get excited about some of the most banal objects of the day-to-day.

Add new comment

Mastery of Faux Finishes

christopherhartchambers — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:36:10 +0000

Mastery of Faux Finishes christopherhar… July 7, 2025 - 12:36

Topics

Art Review

Tags

sclupture

Hiroyuki Hamada, #100, 2023, Painted Resin, 38 x 63 x 26.5" Base: 35 x 46 x 26.5"

Hiroyuki Hamada: New Sculpture
May 6 - June 13, 2025
Bookstein Projects, 39 East 78th Street, NYC

This exhibition of Hiroyuki Hamada’s new sculptures comprises eleven works, both free-standing sculptures and wall hangings. I hesitate to term all of the latter “bas reliefs,” while several of the major works certainly are. A nd those are very similar in formulation to the free-standing sculptures, although they are sans the hallmark pedestals, which stand to be part and parcel with the abstract forms they support.

The smaller wall-hung pieces are more akin to bricolage painting, as folded, bent, and twisted scraps of what looks like metal or leather are affixed to flat, subtly toned, apparently wooden substrates. The larger works impart a distinctly Japanese aesthetic in their elegant, zen-like, and graceful simplicity of pure form; as such, without any backing besides the wall, or they are free-standing. What appear to be natural materials, such as white or black ceramic tile, rusted iron, or stone, are also displayed on bases of what look to be thoroughly rusted pipes. To be clear on this point: the artist considers these works painted sculptures. They are all constructed of synthetic materials. Hamada’s masterful use of trompe l'oeil surfacing is astounding. The rusty piping is, in fact, PVC, and the aquiline shapes they support are carved insulation foam coated with painted plastic resin. Polystyrenes have been popular with artists since at least the 1950s and '60s when Jean Dubuffet and Nikki de Saint Phalle first explored the then-new found resource.

Hiroyuki Hamada, #88, 201 - 20, Painted Resin, 29 x 47 x 41"

The properties of these media allow for direct impulsive carving and so generally disregard the conventional sculptural necessity of pre-construction of an armature, or so to speak, skeleton within, thereby allowing the artist an unrestrained free hand in expression. Notably, Dubuffet topped off his monumental works with stucco while de Saint Phalle frequently embellished her works with mosaics. More recently, others have crusted the artifice with epoxies, fiberglass, urethane putties, or other substances; then painted them in order to stave off degradation resulting from exposure to sunlight. These are industrial materials often used in construction, or automotive assembly, shipbuilding, and even for making surfboards. Significantly, pragmatic considerations have enabled artists to explore and discover various possibilities. These newfound materials were lightweight, comparatively inexpensive, and easily manipulated without the need for a foundry. If Hiroyuki Hamada’s works were composed of what they convincingly appear to be, they would weigh more than could be lifted in this gallery’s elevator, or hung on its sheetrock walls. Yet there are laborious old-school techniques that could enable his vision with a forge and kiln. Frankly, Hamada’s mastery of faux finishes over the coated, smoothed, and refined forms is so complete that I didn’t notice until he mentioned it.

The illusionistic pragmatism is not what grabbed me. I was attracted to the work purely for it’s aesthetics–it’s elegance: the simple smooth forms which reference predecessors Isamu Noguchi and Jean Arp’s exigencies, amongst many functional designers, who modeled their modernist forms in traditional materials–whilst Hamada’s tasteful combinations of industrial supplies are not what they seem to be at all, presenting a fascinatingly duplicitous conundrum.

Add new comment

Trust Issue

Millree Hughes — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 02:31:31 +0000

Trust Issue Millree Hughes June 8, 2025 - 22:31

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

"Pond with Early Snow III," 42" x 38"

Mary Temple: Rough in the Distant Glitter
Pamela Salisbury Gallery
Hudson, NY
May 17 - June 15, 2025

"Devoid of locus, there is nothing to objectify." Nagarjuna (2nd C)

It's another important time for painters. Digital Art, Photography, and Video Art have all suffered because of social media. We have endured so many ghastly lies and had so many useless products foisted on us that all remote artwork feels untrustworthy. Anything with a physical quality or that is as unlike a phone image as possible is true.

With a landscape painting, you feel as though you are witnessing a genuine response to a real place. You are looking at a different place, in a different time, asking yourself, "Whose eyes am I looking through?"

Temple mixes abstraction and figuration approaches together. Or rather, certain modes of abstraction are employed to convey space. Different artists and times come to your eye as you pass over the surface. A Whitten-like smear, an occluded Guston blodge, a treacley Mitchell line. Compactified dimensions whose works are revealed across a small surface.

It also happens along the Z axis. She situates the viewer a certain number of paces away from the painting—the place where it coalesces. The closer you get, the more it disintegrates into abstraction.

It's one of the many dualities of this show. Hot/cold, light/shadow, close/far. The blue and the orange. One representing the physical, the other representing light, the évanescent.

These landscape and seascape paintings are mostly empty. There are no obvious stand-ins for the figure, like a landform or a lone tree. Snowy branches bend ant-like arms, creating an empty frame.

"Pond with Early Snow III" increases the chromatic value of different parts to distract your attention from the whole. The snow obscures areas of the scene. The water, the land, and the sky share colours. Everything teeters on the edge. It's all part of dematerializing the subject.

Campfire in the Snow 1

Her "Campfire in Snow I" painting finally fills the space, acting as a mediator between the blue and the orange. You are no longer looking into a clearing but are focused on an object and an activity. The flame crackles in swathes of hot colour, melting the blue. The broken branches take on a broken figure appearance, like an abstracted body.

Mary's paintings work well on social media. They transform well into posts. But there are certain colours that are not photographable. The contrast is pushed for the phone image, which limits colour possibilities. Texture can't be seen either. You have to turn up because these are paintings that demand your presence.

Add new comment

Thank you Millree, this is…

Thank you Millree, this is so gorgeously written. 🙏🏼

Add new comment

What's In A Name?

Kathleen Cullen — Fri, 30 May 2025 15:18:06 +0000

What's In A Name? Kathleen Cullen May 30, 2025 - 11:18

Topics

Art Review

Tags

group show

Artist: Nora Turato. Installation view. Courtesy of No Name, Paris Photographer: Thomas Lannes

Visiting the Paris art scene, a gallery titled No Name, featuring art in a show called “A Hundred Ways to Disappear,” proves to be anything but nondescript. An academic sense of art history, combined with innovative curation, left this reviewer wanting to know the details of how and why the selections were made. No Name director and curator Léo Panico was gracious enough to talk with me.

Kathleen Cullen: No Name gallery is in Paris, so let’s start with an overview of the program and the focus of the gallery to familiarize our Culture Catch readers. Also, please describe your role and why you decided to add the curation of this show?

Léo Panico: No Name is a project space founded by the art advisor Patricia Marshall in 2022 with the idea of inviting artists, critics collector and curators to collaborate with us on curating shows, to see what the dialogue between our advisory perspective could be, leaning on the post conceptual and minimalist side of contemporary art, and the one from other professional from the artworld. It requires from both sides–us and our guests–a true desire to collaborate. We, for instance, worked with the Mexican-based artist Dario Escobar, the curator Daniel Birnbaum, the movie producer Jacqui Davies, and the French art critic Armelle Leturcq.

Most of the artists exhibited have rarely been shown in France; we generally collaborate with foreign galleries, allowing their artists to reach a new audience.

PIERRE ALLAIN & STEFANA McCLURE. Installation view. Courtesy of No Name. Photographer: Thomas Lannes

This exhibition is a turning point as it is the first we're doing without inviting someone as co-curator. I wanted to work for a long time on the theme of absence and disappearance as a tempting response to the overabundance of images and words surrounding us. Absence as a refusal, a soft resistance where what is suggested prevails over what is given, the part prevailing over the whole.

KC: You use this quote to open up the information about the show. What does it reference? Did the quote help inspire you, or was it a discovery after you arrived at the theme?

“To look at what you wouldn’t look at, to hear what you wouldn’t listen to, to be attentive to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary” - Paul Virilio

LP: It was a late discovery. This quote reflects on the possibility of looking at things differently, and being alert, more vigilant to what is around. It is hard not to overlook artworks, it requires effort and time from the viewers, especially when the works claim a multi-aspect, which is the case for some of the works in this show. This quote is also a reference to the concept of Inframince developed by Marcel Duchamp in the 1930s that questions the limits between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, art and non-art. This notion is at the center of the exhibition.

KC: The show contains drawings, media, paintings, sculpture, and even audio. Please tell us how what is really such a wide array of styles all comes under the heading of “ A Hundred Ways To Disappear”?

LP: The idea was not to display an exhaustive list of all possible mediums, despite the title of the show! I was more interested in the possible connections and dialogue between each work. A number of them are related to language and its failure to seize our reality. For instance, Stefana McClure's works from the Films on Paper series, in which all the subtitles of a film are written by the artist on tracing paper and then superimposed and transferred onto a colored medium, result in two illegible white lines on a colored screen. A single image contains an entire film, whose content is unknown to us since all the letters are merging to create two almost continuous and unreadable lines. The meaning is here covered by a layering of words and sentences, as if our desires to know and to always add more could only result in an even more partial understanding of things. Pierre Allain’s sound piece compiles testimonies of people unsuccessfully trying to remember the name of a movie that traumatized them. The work is titled Tip of My Tongue and is about this feeling of lacking words and memory failing us. Nora Turato (image top) employs expressions or sentences that are now empty shells, as they have almost lost any meaning after being so overused.

KC: Since the very nature of art is to be seen, heard, or in some way experienced, disappearing seems almost like the last goal you would have. But when I see the transparent sculpture of Olga Balema, one is suddenly aware of the idea. Can you describe how the work of the artists featured is part of the curatorial choices?

Olga Balema & Jeronimo Ruedi. Installation view. Courtesy of No Name. Photographer: Thomas Lannes

LP: Olga Balema’s work was essential in the conception of the show. For me, her work is redefining what sculpture could be, in a very modest yet powerful way. The reflective and transparent surface of the work almost disappears in the space, but is inviting its environment into it at the same time. A single ray of light transforms it and then irradiates the room. The sculpture evolves throughout both the day and the visitor's displacement in the space. Olga’s work, among others in the show, explores these circumventing strategies, on how not to be upfront and give all the keys for their understanding at once.

KC: I think the show presents an almost ideal challenge to the viewers in that the work may not always be traditional, but at the same time, command attention no matter how subtle - would you agree? Is the challenge part of the point?

LP: I like this idea of a challenge when looking at an artwork. No Name is located in a bourgeois apartment and has a strong presence, with its marble chimneys and moldings on the walls. It requires one to have a significant curatorial perspective if you don’t want to fall into the showroom category.

Some of the works in the show have a substantial presence despite their minimalist and barely visible aspect, such as the large work by Michel Parmentier titled 5 avril 1991 and made of white pastel stripes on tracing paper. The result is a 300 cm x 300 cm (120 x 120 in.) piece manifesting its aura in the room while almost dissolving into the wall. Same with Latifa Echakhch’s Erratum 2004-2013 piece, made of 350 broken tea glasses shattered on the floor. The tea glasses are a symbol of Moroccan culture, the artist’s birth country. Here, lying on the floor, the glass shards form a cutting reflection on cultural heritage, colonialism, hospitality, and femininity.

Most of the works are playing with the notion of afterwardsness, as if what we were seeing were the traces and spectral shapes of past forms.

KC: You have really worked to educate the viewer with a variety of artists' perspectives. Can you elaborate on this with some examples from the show?

LP: This is what makes No Name an exciting project, bringing artists to an audience that is sometimes not familiar with them and that we want to support, in a space that is the opposite of a white cube.

LATIFA ECHAKHCH Erratum, 2004-2013 broken tea glasses scattered on the floor variable dimensions courtesy of the artist

We try to create dialogues between works from confirmed artists and younger ones. In the show, a video of Paulo Nazareth crossing the border between Mexico and the US while disappearing in the sand dunes is facing a sculpture by Matthias Odin. This sculpture consists of an assemblage of various objects related to the domestic sphere that he collected while living in precarious conditions. These works are two different perspectives on migration and roaming, one from one state to another, and one on what it is to be a stranger in your own city, both questioning notions of belonging and domesticity.

KC: Having seen the work in the show, I can attest to the impact of the theme. How has the finished product impacted you as the curator?

LP: I’m surprised to see how all the works continue to grow on you when you share the space with them for some time, and how new dialogues between them are emerging, thanks to the dialogue they allow with visitors. I now see how Berenice Olmedo’s work is related to the classical history of sculpture. The work we have in the show reminds me of a female torso from the Parthenon, Iris, the winged messenger goddess, now shown at the British Museum, but almost as a negative imprint of this classical torso.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Hundred Ways to Disappear
No Name
3 Place de l'Alma
75008 Paris
April 11 - June 24, 2025
Instagram
contact: leo@marshallfineart.com

Add new comment

Alchemical Romance

Millree Hughes — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:50:39 +0000

Alchemical Romance Millree Hughes April 17, 2025 - 10:50

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

Flame, 2024 oil on linen 44 x 31 ins.

"My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed/into new bodies." - Ovid

PPOW gallery feels hushed by Judith Linhares's new suite of paintings. There's a chapel-like quality to the room; each painting gives off a subdued glow. But these are not windows; rather, each piece is like a slab of the material that this dimension is made of.

The painted subjects are occupying an impossible space. They defy the normal rules of perception. A motif of a knitted quilt appears under many of the figures and vases of flowers. However, frequently, their own perspective lines throw the vanishing point into the deep distance, even though the shadows on the wall behind the objects make them seem very close. At other times, the knitted surface tilts wildly towards us, pitching the objects out of the canvas as we fall into the "space."

The lighting is often both front-lit, top-lit, and sometimes side-lit too. A recurring double daisy image seems to have flower heads lit on one side and the other in shadow despite this hard light not affecting anything else in the space. The place that we, the viewers, are in seems to light the canvas and create shadows like Plato's cave that dance behind the flowers in an animated cartoony silhouette. This light appears to come from a fire or candles.

In one of the most spectacular paintings in this powerful show, "Flame," the quilt has been shrunk(relative scale also follows its own rules in this world), a figure, which may be the artist as a young girl holding a toy rabbit. We can't make out her expression.

A tiny votive candle on a red bandana casts unflickering shadows in four directions, like the spokes of a wheel. It reminds me of a pavement memorial that you might see in a Hispanic neighborhood. There are doublings and intimations of mortality throughout this show. The light will eventually go out.

Behind it is a disproportionate brass vase sporting dark flowers. Behind that, a double circle of radiating lines is either the apex of a circus tent without its pole or a new kind of nonlight casting a dark double burst.

Judy has always employed stripes. As backgrounds, wallpaper hinted at tents or otherworldly rays of light. They can be parallel or radiating from a single source or, as in "Backyard Bouquet," performing an impossible half zig zag under a vase of flowers.

Flower paintings have long been part of her output. In more figure-orientated shows, they've acted as less loaded images so we can step away from the psychic drama of the figure pieces and enjoy the bliss of her colors and forms entirely for themselves. But now the flower paintings are filled with loaded images. A drawing of two open hands in a book. An old photograph of a man. An image of a pregnant woman is a reminder that in her world, from girlhood to womanhood, women give of themselves and that even though they encounter dangers like narcissistic men, other jealous women, and angry lions, they do so without fear.

In this dimension, we have to accept the rules, whatever they are, or run the risk of having our hippocampus frozen by the contradictions in an unresolvable paralysis.

PPOW Gallery 392 Broadway New York, NY 10013, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Tel 212-647-1044 (tel:212-647-1044)

info@ppowgallery.co

Add new comment

On Sense

Millree Hughes — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 02:05:05 +0000

On Sense Millree Hughes February 2, 2025 - 21:05

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

David Humphrey: PorTraits

Fredericks & Freise, NYC

Dec. 12 through Feb. 8

Social media and the engines that power its algorithms engage us in a race to the bottom. The stupider depths have worse music, more ill-informed news, and bad ideas.

David Humphrey's wild melange of painting styles was an argument for pluralism. He and other New York artists like Amy Silman and Michael St. John imagined painting as a manifestation of '90s tolerant liberalism. All kinds of things can coexist on the canvas because relationships matter.

In a big, messy, diverse country like America, this all makes sense, but nowadays, I believe that breaking rigid habits of thinking is more important.

In the main room, David's large paintings are made of carefully arranged parts. They seem to be worked out in advance rather than "found," as there is very little reworking going on. The paintings are much less oily than they used to be, and the colors are keyed up. I think a lot of artists are thinking about how their work will be read on the phone, as this is how a lot of painting is experienced now.

Plant Thoughts, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 72 inches

Is it a good example? The parts are laid out for consideration, and there is plenty of space between them. The conflict of black squiggles to the right on the blue and orange ground has a calligraphic quality. It contrasts with a more Instagram-like selfie head to the left.

Figures are often going through something. Stretched, smooshed, and, in this case, "censored." This one is pixelated, which relates to denying the viewer the ability to read it accurately. She has a plant growing out of her head, which reappears in other watercolors.

I'm reminded of the late Richard Foreman. Watching his plays, I often felt as if I was at the center of a vortex. There was an activity on stage that I couldn't follow. It was occasionally abated by a direct-to-audience speech that didn't really go anywhere in narrative terms.

With Foreman, as with David Lynch's movies, I find it best to adopt a relaxed, alert, but accepting state, just as I would do if I were meditating.

These artists all work within glittering structures made to contain their ideas. Seductive formal qualities make the work more available. Lynch's movies happen in gloriously lit vistas. Foreman's plays are like exquisite clock mechanical ballets, and Humphrey's paintings appear in gorgeous colors. They ask us to be free, despite the obstacles, to be open, even if we are afraid.

Above the pixelated head is a flourish of orange paint. It seems to act as a shadow to the head/mass of black strokes.

This play of like and unlike in unusual constructions is crucial to his work. It's poetry.

The back room of the gallery is like the inside of David's head. There are sculptures on shelves, watercolors, and a video curated by his wife, the artist Jennifer Coates. It's where experiments happen.

Looking at the back room, I saw connections from the sculpture to the sketches and into the video. Humphrey reminds me to perceive associations outside of narrative or familiar perceptual connections. For example, a thing may cast a "shadow," even if unformed. A ceramic cat with a broken face took me back to the first show of his that I ever saw at Deven Golden's gallery in the '90s. It was a show of piles of found broken ceramics formed into new sculptural totems.

A conjunction of yellow balls on a pedestal reminded me of a Cezanne fruit bowl in some kind of flux. The watercolor behind it is an ectopic portrait. An image of the artist sleeping on a sofa seems to be a focal point. Reality reassembles itself in his dreams.

The absurd is a way to open the mind to new possibilities. In the world we live in now, we are constantly being forced to make normal decisions and have normal responses. As I write, AutoCorrect is changing my wurds! Nonsense is a powerful antidote.

Add new comment

Highly Pitched Colored Narratives

Mary Hrbacek — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 22:16:09 +0000

Highly Pitched Colored Narratives Mary Hrbacek December 25, 2024 - 17:16

Topics

Art Review

Tags

painter

A Midsomer Night's Dream, oil on canvas, 72 x 60," 2024

Katya Leonovich: American Renaissance

Leonovich Gallery 10/1-12/31/24

Leonovich Gallery presents an inaugural show curated by Elga Wimmer of eighteen new large-scale oil on canvas paintings by Katya Leonovich, gallerist, and artist. The gallery is the "new kid on the block" of established and mega-galleries on West 24^th Street in the N.Y. art district for international and world-class artists. The daring and expansive works on view have not been molded to the usual expectations that typically reflect the "New York School" painting style; far from it! Her freely flowing radical painting technique is linked through touch and content to German Expressionism. Leonovich, a former fashion designer, goes all in with rough, textured brush strokes of unusual vigor. Her highly pitched colored narratives do not spare the viewer or seek to please. They are emotionally charged statements that focus on male subjects, accentuating the tension and highly wrought challenges that span the lives of many men in Western culture.

Leonovich paints the figures in loose, vibrant strokes that draw the eye through the fluid musculature of her nude male figures, many of whom express the discord of a struggle with animals that may symbolize the impulses and emotions they are confronting. The bright, uncompromising backgrounds function as metaphors for the aggressiveness, strength, roughness, and unrestrained physicality that is often associated with men. Women, in contrast, have traditionally been linked with the finer feelings of caring, empathy, compassion, and delicacy of manner and behavior. Women sometimes cry when a film has an especially sad ending; I question if men have been sufficiently liberated yet to cry at a sad conclusion!

Earthly Delights, oil on canvas, 72 x 60," 2024.

These are not harmonious colors, they are visually searing, challenging the observer to confront a non-traditional approach to visual expression; their unrelenting power may startle the viewer, until they become accustomed to the force of its impact. Various animals function as foils that engage the male subjects in ferocious physical combat, but some works reflect reconciliation, perhaps displaying mastery over difficult tendencies and feelings. There are around eight works that explore the process of struggle, while another eight display a sense of companionship and shared well-being between men and wild animals that personify their passions and instincts.

A variety of carefully chosen creatures establish the character of the action in each format. In "Crescendo," a large gorilla and an alligator surround a crouching man, hinting at the brutality he may face in his own evolving nature and the strong force of his id/sexuality. In "Universal Manna," the figure tries to extricate his foot from a kangaroo pouch, perhaps to free himself from the overbearing influence of his own mother or of his ancestral roots. In "Lionheart," the cool blue male seen from the back manages to overcome a young lion that he carries on his shoulders; the lion in Mesopotamian reliefs signifies the battle between the creator-mother lion and the male destroyer.

The painting "In Obscurity to Danger" features a seated figure who grips an erect asp while he sits seemingly comfortably on the shell of a large tortoise. In China, the snake is a sexual symbol associated with the male organ, which is a vehicle for lust. Snakes are thought to embody cleverness and duplicity. The turtle is the Native American symbol for the Earth Mother and for the Earth itself. In China, the tortoise encircled by a snake represents the North and Winter, embodying the belief that all tortoises are females who exclusively mate with snakes. "Knockout" is an especially intense image of a fallen boxer who is lying vulnerable in the ring overseen by a triumphant kangaroo. Kangaroos in Australia are known to be both fierce fighters and vigilant mothers who embody ancestral spirits. This image denotes circumstances in which the confrontation with the weaknesses of one's inbred heritage has been lost.

From Obscurity to Danger, oil on canvas, 72 x 60," 2024

These paintings express Leonovich's personal agendas in provocative imagery and contrasting hues. The works recall the ruthless quality that defines the art of Francis Bacon. They spur the viewer to explore their own susceptibilities in response to the artist's concerns. These works are highly original. It is rare for an artist to display such unlimited dynamism with such unfolding vigor. Leonovich explores men's psyches to reveal their inner demons in order to find what lies below the surface of the so-called civilized man. Her investigation is thorough and intense. She tenaciously digs into her content until vital aspects of men’s characters are made visually manifest, employing animal symbolism as the core of her narratives.

Color plays a significant role in her oeuvre. She is not willing to tone down the highly charged feelings behind the brightly contrasting, even clashing colors she freely uses. Her work is not meant to be pretty or restrained, quite the opposite, but it is nothing if not wholly authentic. Leonovich perhaps mirrors in her art the contentious political atmosphere we are experiencing in contemporary America. The painting "Monkey Business" suggests the total folly that engaging in war perpetrates. The show encompasses some political undertones, as seen in "You Choose." Finally, the painting that borrows the title of Johnny Cash’s song "I Walk the Line" visually expresses musical notes played by a naked man in a cowboy hat. Our democracy is on the brink of implosion, just as these figures are, for the most part, on the edge of their inner turmoil, in search of a way through and out of the confusion and angst that will lead some of the subjects to serenity.

Self-taught Russian artist Leonovich has much to say and is unapologetic about how she presents her visions in deeply mythic engagements between man and his inner demons. Her art can be seen as a feminist manifesto that makes men, instead of solely women, the subjects under scrutiny in life's constant battle to break us or strengthen us. Her animal imagery perfectly suggests the impulses that must be overcome in order to find peace, clarity, and tranquility within oneself and in one’s battle for self-understanding and self-control. The darker backgrounds on some paintings seem to imply night, as if some forces are just below the surface of the subconscious mind, waiting to emerge to be recognized and dealt with. One of the most striking aspects of these works is the confident depiction of male anatomy in strong, forceful brush strokes that mold the tendons and muscles to the underlying bodily forms. Leonovich's professional work in men's fashion has strengthened her ability to capture the movement of the male body convincingly.