Contemporary Art and Culture
Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.
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The current exhibition by Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey, running from February 8 to March 8, explores a subject central to painting since its inception. Independently, their work engages with abstraction and figuration, using color, surface, and shape as primary vehicles. When viewed in person, the exhibition demonstrates how each artist approaches their medium to address their own interest between abstraction and the figure. However, when this exhibition is viewed together in the digital realm, another issue emerges—one that was pivotal in art criticism during the 1980s and 1990s that deals with an issue that pre-occupied Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco: the topic of simulation and simulacra or simulacra and hyperreality.
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Thomas Motley’s first novel, The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country, is rooted in stewardship—a shared responsibility for the earth, animals, and one another. This theme has become more central to his paintings over time, though respect for nature has always been part of his work. His non-fiction writing and lectures on organic farming have also reflected this idea.
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Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman offers a mesmerizing view of patterns as a deeply seated human instinct. Fittingly, a radial symmetry unfolds from the vertex of the L-shaped room. Yet curator Jan Dickey balances this evenness with a syncopated rhythm of paired artworks and bold standalone pieces. In creating a pattern of patterns, this show offers a metonymic view of artists running with different strands from the fabric of a species-wide impulse toward order and adornment.
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The exhibition Abstraction by Any Other Name, curated by Dan Cameron at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, celebrates the diverse approaches to abstract painting among eight contemporary artists: Jane Fine, Matthew Kolodziej, Regina Scully, Lui Shtini, Louise Belcourt, Iva Gueorguieva, Jill Moser, and Frank Owen. The show, running from September 6, 2024, to February 8, 2025, is presented in two parts, each highlighting different artists.
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From an early age, Louise P. Sloane has been compelled by an intense fascination with how color and texture influence mood. “I was one of those art nerd kids who went nuts each time there was a new color crayon from Crayola!” she recalls, describing a childhood shaped by a relentless curiosity about different mediums and textures. Making art quickly became the dominant force in her life, guiding her on a creative journey that has spanned over fifty years.
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Silence Breaking is a hidden gem of a show featuring abstract paintings by Gail Winbury at the Carl and Helen Burger Gallery on Kean University’s idyllic, park-like campus in Union, NJ. A New Jersey native, Gail Winbury’s oil paintings depict interpretations of various poems and personal stories that manifest into abstractions with colliding shapes and colors. Her use of gestural abstraction and expressionist lines reflect her interest in the elicitation of psychological responses via painting. Most of the work in the gallery is in large square format, dominated by celadon or mint blue green – a color frequently ranked among the calmest colors. The Field of Green series, which is most of the show, is a departure for the artist, whose previous series had much more aggressive lines and brighter shapes, which more comfortably rested into a traditional rectangular surface dimension. The compositional choices in this body of work are deliberate and minimal, reflecting a more meditative feel full of cooler tones and calmer transitions.
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Alchemy is an age-old mode of science that seeks to transform matter, turning it into something else, something new. It remains a relevant practice, prevailing as the medieval genesis of chemistry, which only went on to titillatingly promise a universal elixir to the denizens of the Renaissance. For centuries, alchemists lacked the scientific language to describe what they were observing in their experiments, as a result they projected their own subjectivity and personal processes onto external chemical operations – in this vein, the exhibition’s work at hand achieves its success. Through alchemy, lead is turned into gold, and as an 18th-century practitioner wrote with alchemists in mind: “Wherever thou art, all is brought to perfection; may the realm of thy Knowledge become subject unto thee. May our will in all our work be only thee, self-moving Power of Light! And as in the whole of Nature thou accomplishest all things, so accomplish all things in our work.”[1] Here, a connection to the material world reigns supreme.
Continue reading “Suzanne Wright: The Alchemy of Equals at Tappeto Volante”
Bill Scott’s solo show Two Decades at Hollis Taggart Gallery’ celebrates this painter’s long career of collaboration with this renowned New York City gallery. Bill, a fairly reserved individual, often clad in neutral colors at gallery openings, produces profoundly beautiful works bursting with color. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bill, a friend and mentor for more than 15 years, dating back to my days as an undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
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Carrie Moyer’s solo show Timber! is her debut with the renowned Alexander Gray Associates gallery in New York City. Her signature vibrant abstractions shine in the airy rooms of the Tribeca gallery space. Centering around “social and environmental instability,” this new body of work offers greater complexity and a more somber tone than Moyer’s previous work.
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