abstract painting – Page 3

June 5, 2025June 6, 2025, by Jan Dickey

The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson

In Dialogue

For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.

May 13, 2025May 11, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Naomi Lev and the Art of Process Curating

In Dialogue

Installation view with Naomi Lev at *The Space Between Knowing* exhibition at The TL Studio. Photographed by Argenis Apolinario. Left (top to bottom): Shony Rivnay, *The Loss of Innocence Squared,* 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch; Shony Rivnay, *Keep Movin’,* 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch. Right: Shony Rivnay, *Initiation of Movement No.1*, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 77 inch.

Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025, by Art Spiel

Beauty is a Blast: a tribute to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Featured Exhibition

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, installation view, *Beauty is a Blast* at Art Cake

The exhibition Beauty is a Blast, on view at Art Cake in Brooklyn, brings together the work of more than 200 artists in a posthumous examination of the life and influence of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024). It documents a network of relationships, of pedagogy, of influence. Conceived by artist and curator Christian Haub in 2021 as a modest acknowledgment of Gilbert-Rolfe’s legacy, the project was paused, then resumed in late 2024 in collaboration with Gilbert-Rolfe’s family and the Art Cake team. As word spread, the exhibition grew, not by design, but by response. The scale—over 250 works—became a measure of the reach of an individual who spent decades thinking through the terms and implications of contemporary abstraction.

April 12, 2025April 11, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Audrey Stone

In the studio with Way Down, 2024, 50×50.25” photo credit Andrew Schwartz @artphotobiz

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Audrey has been in DUMBO since March, 2024. Her studio is at 45 Main Street, #1052.

April 8, 2025April 7, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Sarah Martin- Nuss: Future Currents- At Rachel Uffner Gallery

In following Martin-Nuss’ work for a few years now, I was always mesmerized by the way they could establish and build a living landscape using both physical spaces and water reflections. A living landscape by means of movement, layers, and currents. This exhibition shows works that each establish their own space and carry with them their own evolutions into an entirely new space the longer you look at them.

March 13, 2025March 12, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Barbara Friedman’s All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch&Co

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Barbara Friedman

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.

February 19, 2025March 3, 2025, by Riad Miah

Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Installation of “Intersection” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Image courtesy of the gallery.

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.

February 10, 2025March 11, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

T.D. Motley: The Art of Farming

In Dialogue

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.

January 23, 2025January 30, 2025, by Will Kaplan

Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman

Installation view of Prayer / Pattern / Prayer

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.

December 30, 2024January 7, 2025, by Riad Miah

Abstraction by Any Other Name at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

View fullsize — Installation of Abstraction By Any Other Name, Part I. Photo courtesy of Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York

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.