Contemporary Art and Culture
Water moves. It reflects, absorbs, distorts. It never repeats itself. River-Rising, a four-channel video installation by Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller, is built on these elements. Filmed along three river estuaries—the Garonne in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River—the work isolates the shifting surfaces of water.
Continue reading “Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller: River-Rising at Hunterdon Art Museum”
The paintings in Margaret Koval’s latest exhibition, The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life, capture a sense of disorientation—recognizable urban and suburban scenes where something is slightly off. They are rich in color and composition, drawing viewers in with pleasing views, yet an underlying unease lingers. Like waking up to find someone has rearranged your furniture overnight, they create a feeling of estrangement within the familiar.
Continue reading “Margaret Koval: The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life at ArtWRKD”
Jim Condron’s exhibition at the New York Studio School, curated by Karen Wilkin, continues his consistently thoughtful Collected Things series, inviting viewers to see everyday objects as vessels of personal and cultural memory. The sculptures, varying in size from around 20 to 96 inches, playfully transform seemingly ordinary items into layered narratives that bring unexpected elements together.
Continue reading “Jim Condron: Collected Things at the New York Studio School”
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.
Continue reading “Louise P. Sloane: Optically charged text-ures”
Eva Zanardi, the guest curator of the group show—In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty—observes that many times in her life, art has raised her awareness and consequently even made her reconsider her point of view on important issues. Zanardi says that the prerogative that should belong to most art is to be thought-provoking; as the educator and activist Cezar A. Cruz says, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Eva Zanardi shared some of her curatorial process and gave us here a brief guide through the show.
Continue reading “In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty “
The first national Ethiopian pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, housed in the elegant sixteenth-century Palazzo Bollani, may be challenging to find, but the effort is amply rewarded. In his solo exhibition Prejudice and Belonging, Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa presents figures that inhabit a broad and complex emotional spectrum where fragility and strength coexist. Ethiopian iconography and European modernist figurative painting converge, creating a striking visual dialect articulated throughout the ten large paintings and small portraits that fill the three interconnected rooms.
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Dorothy Robinson’s family moved often during her childhood, starting in rural Iowa, where they farmed for generations and eventually settled in California. After high school, she bounced between colleges before landing at UC Berkeley. Studying art never crossed her mind, but she was drawn to geography, “probably because of its strong visual component—map making, field trips, slide shows,” Robinson says. During an internship, she learned darkroom skills and later worked in commercial photo labs, shaping her sense of color while making color prints. An invitation from an artist friend to join a drawing group was transformative, and started Robinson on the path to a life of making art.
Continue reading “Dorothy Robinson: Paint Through Space and Time”
at Griffiss International Sculpture Park , Rome, NY
Linda Cunningham – Divisions
… hunger and fear can vanquish all human resistance, and all
freedom … Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in danger.
But to know … is to have time to avoid & prevent the moment of
inhumanity … the infinitesimal difference between the human
being and the non-human being …
————–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
Continue reading “Divisions: To Be Human Is To Act Humanely”
”BRUTALITY!
CLARITY THAT HURTS […]
BRUSH AS FAST AS YOU CAN –
TRY TO CAPTURE RACING TIME“
—–George Grosz
Nearly a century after the Weimar Republic’s brief, chaotic existence, curator Hans-Peter Wipplinger presents Splendor and Misery: New Objectivity in Germany at Vienna’s Leopold Museum. This comprehensive exhibition, the first of its kind in Austria, brings together around 150 works—100 paintings, 40 works on paper, photographs, and archival materials—from international museums and private collections. Born from the ashes of World War I, Neue Sachlichkeit offered a stark, unsentimental portrayal of reality, capturing both the hardships and the hopes of the “Golden Twenties.” The show features a lineup of key figures of modernism, such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad, alongside lesser-known artists such as Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Grethe Jürgens, Lotte Laserstein, Felix Nussbaum, Gerta Overbeck, Rudolf Schlichter, and others, who each captured the era’s spirit with an unflinching eye.
Continue reading “Splendor and Misery at Leopold: New Objectivity in Germany”
German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, born in 1876, is relatively unknown in the United States. This is quite surprising, considering she painted the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these audacious portraits capture her own pregnancy—another first among Western women artists, paving the way for later figures like Alice Neel. Modersohn-Becker’s portraits of women spanning all ages—bold in their composition, subtle in their detail, and utterly present—strike a powerful note throughout the first major retrospective of her art in the United States, curated by Jill Lloyd at the Neue Galerie New York, and fittingly titled Ich bin Ich / I Am Me.
Continue reading “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me at the Neue Gallerie”