Review

March 25, 2013, 8:30am

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian Gallery

Basquiat’s career encapsulated the kind of intensity and drama that art legends are made of. Within a period of five years he went from being a high school drop-out living on the streets of New York, to an established painter whose work was in high demand. Shortly thereafter, he died of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven, ending his short, but prolific career. - Nadiah Fellah, NYC Contributor

Listed under: New York, Review

March 21, 2013, 8:30am

Local Color: Rosy Keyser at Peter Blum Gallery

Take that old adage 'a picture is worth a thousand words' and quintuple it, then dive into Rosy Keyser's latest solo Medusa Pie Country, the inaugural exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery's new midtown location. Keyser's canvases are open books, flayed, stained, and/or augmented compositions imbued with visual narrative and reinventions of painting itself. — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Listed under: New York, Review

March 20, 2013, 8:30am

Letter Press: Al Held Alphabet Paintings at Cheim & Read

Some of the most massive — and massively satisfying visually, despite of and due to their reverberating minimalism — paintings exhibited in the West Chelsea gallery run right now hang in Cheim & Read, in Al Held's seven-part suite of classic Alphabet Paintings. These are a treat: they exemplify Held's 'golden age' geometric abstraction as much as Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images is tied to Surrealism and Damien Hirst's shark the excessive '90s. But seriously, Held's early hard-edge compositions, spanning 1961-67 and dipping into his deftness with black and white, leave big impressions. — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Listed under: New York, Review

March 19, 2013, 8:30am

The Photographer’s Painter: Mark Takamichi Miller

A child’s road trip is an unlikely painting subject, on a number of levels. Since children do not drive, rarely are they associated with the road trip concept otherwise so prevalent in American culture; yet artist Mark Takamichi Miller centers his latest body of paintings on view at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery on this unusual idea.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

March 18, 2013, 8:30am

Vera Iliatova: Days of Never at Monya Rowe

On view though April 13th, at Monya Rowe’s second-floor gallery in Chelsea, are eight exquisite paintings by the Russian-born artist Vera Iliatova (NAP #86). The artist’s paintings are best described as wooded landscapes, but the buildings and bridges of cities can often be seen through tree’s branches, giving the impression that figures have wandered just beyond an urban environment. Introductory text written by the Ohio painter George Rush best captures this notion. He writes: “Strange things start to happen this far out. They are beyond the limits of the city now, the women...Gone are the signifiers of stability.”

Listed under: New York, Review

March 14, 2013, 8:30am

Dead Zone: Alex Da Corte at Nudashank

Technically speaking, Dead Zone (at Nudashank through March 17) is a group show curated by Philly-based artist Alex Da Corte. But this description isn’t really accurate. Rather than playing the role of curator, Da Corte is bringing in works by other artists and using them as additional materials in his sculptural assemblages.

Listed under: Review

March 13, 2013, 8:30am

Jay DeFeo’s Retrospective at the Whitney Museum

On view at the Whitney Museum in New York are works by the late San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo. The show premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the fall, but its installation at the Whitney is slightly larger, bringing together over 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and drawings by the artist. The sprawling show unites many rarely seen works by DeFeo, who was little-known beyond the Bay Area art scene from the 50s until her death in 1989. However, her lack of a national reputation was not for lack of skill or production, as the retrospective demonstrates. Throughout her life DeFeo worked prolifically in a range of mediums, building a transformative artistic practice that was both visionary and inspiring.

Listed under: New York, Review

March 07, 2013, 8:30am

STROKETRACEBLOW: Mark Making at Steven Zevitas Gallery

StrokeTraceBlow at Steven Zevitas Gallery is a triad of influential, veteran artists; the title describing the physicality of their working processes. The works in the exhibition are small in scale, nothing exceeding twelve inches, demanding a certain amount of intimacy with each piece.

Listed under: Review

March 05, 2013, 8:30am

Pattern Recognition: Jered Sprecher at Jeff Bailey Gallery

Compositional kaleidoscopes could be a useful shorthand for describing Jered Sprecher's oeuvre. As demonstrated in the cheekily titled I Always Lie, Sprecher's third solo exhibition at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, he is equally gifted in color combinations and media application, in a range of scales and often within the same painting. That's not to say the visual effect is erratic, but who needs stabilizing agents when the abstract noise is this awesome?! — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

 

Listed under: New York, Review

March 04, 2013, 8:30am

Keep on Shining: Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner Gallery

Compositionally simple and deeply emotional. Deliberate execution and intuitive adaptation. For 40 years, Suzan Frecon has married these opposing forces in a transcendent, shimmering abstract style unmistakably her own. Throughout paper, her second solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, Frecon delves into the interplay between media and the surfaces receiving it.  — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Listed under: New York, Review

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