What Meets the Eye – Talking Pictures

In Which I Visit Two of the “Gardens on Orchard”

July 23, 2017

The reason I’m such an optimist about this whole climate change business is that at a particularly low point, I took “Botany for Horticulturalists” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (and the rest of the horticultural certificate [...]

Eric Fischl and the Big Uneasy

June 30, 2017

I was going to write about Fischl’s economical brushwork but Dennis Kardon did such a super job on that in “HyperA”, and James Cahill in “Art In America” put the hilarious cherry on top by calling it “near enough.” All I’m [...]

The Intricate Modernism of Anne Harvey

June 14, 2017

It’s startling, disconcerting even, to come across a painter I don’t know who fits into a historical period—Modern Art ( as TJ Clark defines it)—but in her own way. (A similar thing happened several years ago, when I [...]

Mercedes Matter, Early and Late

May 26, 2017

Untitled (Tabletop Still Life), ca. 1998, 38”x 46” Some of Mercedes Matter’s early works have a singsong, seesaw effect—Hans [...]

Sahand Tabatabai “Through the Light of the Stars” at SRO Gallery

April 23, 2017

Big Bear and the Dragon 2016, oil on linen, 30”x 24” A friend who had read a couple of my reviews (at least one) said I [...]

The Painting

April 6, 2017

The Painting Open Casket, Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennial The thing is, it’s a wonderful painting. As many have noted, there is nothing else like it (or nearly as good in my opinion) in Dana Schutz’s oeuvre to date, so how she got [...]

Biennial Artists Grateful to Tiffany and Co

March 20, 2017

Cha.. …t, …dous ,…day [...]

Katharina Grosse: Bad Painting Without Irony

February 13, 2017

Sincerity has returned to Chelsea in a big way, most notably in the work of Katharina Grosse. For one thing, Grosse confesses that by using a spray gun she can express her thoughts very quickly. But has there been any call for that? More hurriedly [...]

“I’ll bet this looks easy” Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim Museum

January 11, 2017

I don’t like Agnes Martin. Do you have a problem with that? How can we have a dialogue if we only think and talk about what we like? I didn’t like her, but I wanted to, circa ’77, when on the advice of a painting teacher, I looked at one [...]

Putting Things in Perspective: David Brody and Elliott Green

December 17, 2016

Brody and Green paint unpeopled, brightly colored, constructed landscapes. By constructed I mean they are neither observed from nature nor painted from photographs. In both men’s work, video games come to mind—specifically the background [...]