January 05, 2015, 1:25pm

NAP Contributor Top 5: Erin Langner

On the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s show, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl recently wrote of painting being in a state of crisis. In response to the show comprised of painters whose “approach characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of the new millennium,” according to MOMA’s website, Schjeldahl rejects the medium’s outright death. Still unoptimistic, he concludes, “Painting can bleed now, but it cannot heal.”

As someone who has spent a lot of time with paintings over the last few years, I had to stop to consider whether I agreed: are the paintings I have encountered bleeding? In trying to answer, I found myself making my list of the five shows that made me think the most about the state of painting this year—its physicality, its lasting presence, and its bloodshed. — Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

Sterling Ruby | SUNRISE SUNSET installation view, image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

December 19, 2014, 4:20pm

VOTE NOW! NAP ANNUAL PRIZE: 2014 READER’S CHOICE POLL

From thousands to one…In 2014 our jurors reviewed the work of more than 20,000 individual works of art by more than 5000 artists. Our jurors have the impossible task of selecting the 240 artists to be featured in New American Paintings. Of those artists, twelve (two from each issue) were distinguished as being “Noteworthy.”

Well, now it is your opportunity to help us turn 12 artists into 1. Below, you will find 2014’s twelve Noteworthy artists listed, along with an image and brief commentary. One of these 12 artists will be named the New American Paintings Artist of the Year! In addition to being featured again in our 2015 June/July issue, the winner of the Reader’s Choice Annual Prize will receive a cash prize of $500 and a $1,000 Blick Art Materials gift certificate sponsored by:

Cast your vote by Sunday January 18 (Midnight EST). The winner of the Reader’s Choice poll will be announced on Wednesday, January 21st.

We want to thank all of the artists who trusted us with their work in 2014. One vote per person will be counted!

Learn more about each artist after the jump!

December 18, 2014, 8:52am

Signifier and Signified: Helen Rebekah Garber at Gallery Wendi Norris

Helen Rebekah Garber’s paintings must be heavy. They’re covered head to toe in thickly impastoed oil paint revealing a layered painting process that must surely take months to complete. The paintings (on view in “Numbers” at Gallery Wendi Norris through January 9, 2015) seem heavy not only because of their size and impastoed heft but also because from a distance their nearly monochromatic surfaces can resemble talismanic rock engravings. They hang on the walls like sacred tablets. There’s a kind of spiritual allusion in Garber’s forms, at once seeming to reference mandalas, religious altarpieces, and Mayan hieroglyphs. The paintings speak to a kind of transcendentalism that we also find in the paintings of Chris Martin (like “For Paul Thek”) or even Forrest Bess (like “Before Man”). But up close Garber’s paintings tell a different story. – Matt Smith Chavez, San Francisco Contributor

Helen Rebekah Garber | Haniel I, 2014, Oil on linen, 60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm), Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris

December 15, 2014, 3:36pm

15 Painters to Watch in 2015 (+ 3)

As I write this, it has been a busy couple of weeks for the medium of painting. I just returned from my annual trip to art world summer camp, aka Art Basel Miami Beach, where thousands of art-hungry viewers were inundated with paintings of every conceivable scale, media, and subject matter. Some were good, some were bad, many were derivative, and most will be forgotten before the decade ends. On the heels of the various fairs closing, critic and curator Christian Viveros-Faune unleashed a caustic and much passed-around article about art fairs and their negative effect on the type of art currently being produced. He specifically targeted what he calls Zombie Painting, which he identifies as a bland and toothless sort of abstraction that seems to be all the rage. (Jerry Saltz has been beating this same drum for quite a while.)

Katherine Bernhardt. Courtesy of Canada, New York City.

Meanwhile, in the high temple of modernism––New York’s Museum of Modern Art––curator and past New American Paintings juror Laura Hoptman has just opened The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. The exhibition features the work of seventeen painters, including Joe Bradley, Matt Connors, Mark Grotjahn, and the young and controversial phenom Oscar Murillo, and is the institution’s first serious group show on painting in a number of years. Most of the artists in this show are art market favorites, so stay tuned as the critical writing on this exhibition is sure to be a roller coaster ride. - Steven Zevitas, Editor & Publisher, New American Paintings