Blog
October 09, 2014, 9:12am
MUST SEE PAINTING SHOWS: OCTOBER
After a sleepy summer the art world is once again up and running full tilt. Among the hundreds of painting shows on view throughout the country this month are close to three-dozen solos by New American Paintings’ alumni. They range from shows by talented emerging artists such as Samantha Bittman at Andrew Rafacz in Chicago and Suzannah Sinclair in Boston to strong mid-career painters such as the phenomenal Sarah McEneaney at Tibor de Nagy in New York City and Emily Eveleth at Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston. I want to give a special shout out to my buddy Eddie Martinez, whose show at the new Kohn Gallery space in Los Angeles confirms what many already knew: Eddie is one of the best natural painters of his generation.
Sarah McEneaney. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy.
There is a lot of good abstraction on view this month. For those in New York City, the fearless Chris Martin has his debut at Anton Kern Gallery and the much-hyped Norwegian artist Fredrik Vaerslev can be considered at Andrew Kreps Gallery. Also in New York, co-curator for the 2014 Whitney Biennial and juror for our upcoming Northeast issue, Michelle Grabner, has just opened a must-see show at James Cohan Gallery. In Los Angeles, don’t miss Sam Falls at Hannah Hoffman and Pia Fries at Christopher Grimes Gallery. If you are in the Bay Area, visit Jessica Silverman Gallery to see the work of Hugh Scott-Douglas, who, like an increasing number of emerging artists, is obsessed with process.
While abstraction continues to look good this season, representational painting has been making a comeback and it owns the month. Over the past two years, more and more young artists have been engaging with imagery, in particular the figure. There are the aforementioned exhibitions by Sarah McEneaney and Suzannah Sinclair to consider. In New York City, emerging artist Gina Beavers continues to push impasto to the limits in her new group of paintings at Clifton Benevento and the virtuosic Angela Dufresne has a new suite of paintings with figure in landscape at Monya Rowe Gallery. Other shows of note around the country include: Storm Tharp at PDX in Portland, OR; Angela Fraleigh at Inman Gallery in Houston; Whitney Bedford at Carrie Secrist in Chicago; and the group show “Bedtime Stories” at Alpha Gallery in Boston.
In a quiet, but extraordinary exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, LA-based artist Paul Sietsema renders carefully selected imagery with such technical dexterity that they almost revert to real objects. Sietsema is not interested in trompe-l’oeil for the sake of showing off; at the end of the day, his paintings and works on paper are a highly considered critique of the production of cultural objects and the roles that they play as they circulate. Taken as a whole, this exhibition represents the various aspects of how a painting can function. - Steven Zevitas, Publisher
October 03, 2014, 9:48am
MFA Annual Competition Deadline
Entry Deadline: October 31, 2014 (Midnight EST)
CALL FOR ARTISTS: MFA ANNUAL
Current Master of Fine Arts Candidates + Current Year MFA Graduates
Benjamin Rogers | Inside the painter's studio - painting in the abbreviated field, 2012, oil on canvas, 45" x 56", courtesy of the artist.
September 26, 2014, 9:17am
Matt Magee at James Kelly Contemporary
In his first solo exhibition at James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe, Phoenix-based artist and recent NYC transplant Matt Magee (NAP #14) offers a bit of a departure from his typically looser, more shapely and often-codified works. In this stripped-down, analytical offering, Recent Paintings and Sculptures features works inspired by observed and imagined forms, collections, data analysis and the Arizona sky. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor
Matt Magee | Narita, 2013, oil on panel; image courtesy of James Kelly Contemporary
September 25, 2014, 9:21am
Erupting Unknowns: Ryan Molenkamp’s Fear of Volcanoes
The first time I came to Seattle was to board a cruise ship, the same reason so many other Northwest outsiders first experience this city. Since I had been traveling with family (not to mention thousands of other cruisers), the only time I recall being alone on the trip was during the cab ride back to the airport, after we returned to port. Sitting in the backseat, moving alongside the lines of cars traveling southbound on I-5, the faint image of Mount Rainier floated among the license plates. It was among this swarm of rendered, friendlier mountains that I first saw the real Rainier, looming seventy miles away, above the mass of clouds that coated the passenger-side window.
Although I have lived here for nine years, and few things I saw during the cruise visit look the same to me now as they did fresh off the ship, Mount Rainier still radiates the same sense of severe immensity, even during its sunniest appearances. Walking into SAM Gallery’s Made in the Northwest show, I was met with a similar hum of severity—this time coming from Seattle artist Ryan Molenkamp’s (NAP #97) painted volcanoes. — Erin Langner, Seattle contributor
Ryan Molenkamp | View from Mt Erie, acrylic on panel, 30 x 40 in., 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
September 24, 2014, 9:49am
Edgar Arceneaux’s “A Book and a Medal” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
Edgar Arceneaux’s “A Book and a Medal: Disentanglement Equals Homogenous Abstractions” opened at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects earlier this month. Challenging and compelling, the show is a triple threat of musts (must-see, -feel, and -experience) all in one.
Edgar Arceneaux | installation view of PLATONIC SOLID’S DREAMING/DETROIT’S SHRINKING (Dodecahedron), 2014, Paintings on mirrored glass, graphite and ink on vellum, layered over colored paper, in a hand crafted steel frames. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
The exhibit features the contents of a partially redacted 1964 letter from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and part of the “Suicide Package,” blackmailing Dr. Martin Luther King by referencing his extramarital affairs and encouraging him to commit suicide. Another letter that serves as the former’s bookend came 50 years later as Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, urges her siblings not to sell their father’s Nobel Prize and bible (objects for which the show is named). Arceneaux explores the complexity of iconicity and monument-making; history and storytelling; and forgetting and memorializing. Using mirror installations and the shape of the redacted letter as a recognizable and repeated template throughout the exhibit, he creates a mood of intrigue, redundancy, and disjuncture. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
September 22, 2014, 9:28am
Texas Oil: Painting and Money at Texas Contemporary Art Fair
As the Houston Fine Art Fair is in full swing, one can’t help but think of her younger, hotter sister, Texas Contemporary Art Fair, which finished its three day run last week. Here’s an overview of the state of painting at this year’s Texas Contemporary. - Seth Orion Schwaiger, Austin Contributor
Donnie Molls | Oil Field 1, 2014, mixed media and oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Edward Cella Art + Architecture
September 09, 2014, 9:50am
A Smile That Ain't A Smile But Teeth: New Works by Umar Rashid
In A Smile That Ain’t a Smile But Teeth, artist, performer, and storyteller, Umar Rashid opened his first solo show under his aforementioned birth name this past weekend at the Reginald Ingraham Gallery. In the art world, Rashid is better known as “Frohawk Two Feathers”—his nom-de-plum and alter ego (NAP #73). This Homeric and Tolkien-esque raconteur is known for reweaving and reinventing a master narrative based on the supposition that France and England had united as “Frengland.” In his painted and sculpted saga, Two Feathers invites viewers through tales of woe and into bloody battles, introduces them to traitorous heroes and lost loves, and amuses them with his wit, humor, and biting sense of irony. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Umar Rashid | installation view of “Post Physical Slavery American Negro Archetype Numbers 1-4,” acrylic and graphite on canvas, four canvases - each 36”x 48.5”. Photo by Ellen C. Caldwell, courtesy of artist and Reginald Ingraham Gallery.
September 02, 2014, 9:49am
Museum Admission: “Gyre: The Plastic Ocean” at the Anchorage Museum
Plastic and its lasting after-effects have been a recurring topic of conversation over the past decade. News about the accumulation of microplastics, the drastic effect of human consumption and waste, and the seemingly permanent lifespan of this man-made material fill our newsfeeds, social media, and minds. I think many of us have been aware with the problem of plastic for a long time (artists too), but it wasn't until I saw Gyre: The Plastic Ocean, curated by Julie Decker, that I really considered the extensive, massive, and exhaustive issues at hand in a more poetic and profound way. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
“Gyre: The Plastic Ocean,” installation view of Mark Dion’s “Cabinet of Marine Debris” and Andy Hughes’ UFO Plastic Gyre Series Circularity Series at the Anchorage Museum. Photos Courtesy of Ellen C. Caldwell.
August 29, 2014, 9:06am
New American Paintings Northeast Competition
August 25, 2014, 9:06am
Amanda Manitach on Painting, Feminism, Whiskey and T-Shirts
Knowing what to expect from Amanda Manitach is a tricky endeavor. The Seattle artist, writer and curator has linked the goring of a matador to menstruation, through imagery of red platform stilettos and dripping shards of beets. She has embroidered lambs’ tongues with clusters of tiny, antique beads, discarding the meticulously renedered work upon completion. She draws and paints works on paper that fuse classical nudes, horses detailed with prominent genitalia and melancholic ghost figures. But, a pair of legs in black stilettos walk behind the lamb tongue scene, and the tongue’s bulbous shape billows like the clouds that tint her watercolors, amending the surprise that the abrubpt shifts within her body of work evoke with the sense that perhaps we should have seen this coming, after all. A similar sensation continued in my conversation with Mantiach on her new show, T-Shirts, at Seattle’s Joe Bar, during which we discussed Instagram inspiration, third-wave feminism, sex murder, and the time she lied about her relationship with painting. – Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Amanda Manitach | Ten Reasons Having A Dick Sucks, ink on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
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