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Todd Bartel: an Omni-coupler

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Todd Bartel in front of Pollination of Devonia, (Synterial series), 2002, gallery talk, L(and) exhibition, Room 83, Watertown, MA, photo courtesy of Ellen Wineberg

Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at RISD. He recalls the desks were strewn with magazines, and as soon as the course started, Professor Hardu Keck gave the students a prompt, “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Keck did not mention he was quoting Andre Breton, who was quoting Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He expected his students to work with the strangeness of visual combination and found imagery. That was Todd Bartel’s introduction to Surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an Omni-coupler,” he says.

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Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club

In Dialogue with Dee Shapiro

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Installation view

In the group exhibition Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City the artist Dee Shapiro brings together six contemporary artists who explore content and form of narrative painting ranging from interiors to landscapes, personal to imagined, realistic to fantastic. Featured artists: Jennifer Coates, Laura Karetzky, Judith Linhares, Ernesto Renda, Kyle Staver, and George Towne. The show runs through June 28th.

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Alyssa Fanning: A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space

In Dialogue with Alyssa Fanning

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Alyssa Fanning in her studio in northern NJ, 2020. Photo courtesy of Emma Fanning.

A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, features Alyssa Fanning’s elaborate and richly layered graphite and colored pencil drawings on paper, focusing on the duality of strength and fragility of the natural world. The work includes drawings from two related series, created through a process of combining projection, stencil and improvisation. The pieces range in size from 2.75 by 4.75 inches to 16 by 20 inches and within these intimate boundaries, Alyssa Fanning creates intricate worlds which invite you to plunge in. The exhibition opens June 5th with an opening reception June 4th, and runs through July 3rd, 2021.

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Katrina Bello – Non Human Expressivity


In the studio in Newark, NJ, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist.

New Jersey and Manilla based artist Katrina Bello draws on memories of her childhood experiences in the Philippines. Ranging from small to large scales. her drawings depict geological layers as vast fields of textures and colors – alluring us to sense the awe in vastness while also inviting us to get close and sense the fragility and tenderness in each detail.

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Will Hutnick – Artist as Facilitator


At the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Granville, NY, July 2019, Photo by Monica Hamilton

Will Hutnick is an artist, curator, co-director of Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn from 2015 to 2020 and Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project upstate NY. In his paintings Will Hutnick is using rollers, and includes other mono-printing-like methods to create repetitive passages which form playful and unexpected relationships between shapes and colors. He shares with Art Spiel some of his work process, reflections on the ways his paintings have developed, and some of his other art related practices.

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Artists on Coping: Keren Anavy

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Keren Anavy by Written in Water (detail), site-specific installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, NY, jacket design by Ori Anavy. Courtesy of the artist, photo: Nomi H Rave.

Keren Anavy is a multimedia artist working in drawing, painting, installation and performance. Her process and research-based practice scrutinize the relationship between nature, culture and site. Seeing landscape as a metaphor for political and personal narratives, her interest is how nature can function as a cultural agent in different societies. Anavy has written art reviews in Basis magazine (Hebrew), the New York artistic Director at Radio28, located in Mexico City, and currently a mentor at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), IAP. She is working on a site-specific installation planned for display at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico, and was selected Artist in Residence at Guild Hall of East Hampton, New York, and at Marble House Project, Vermont. During the Coronavirus pandemic Anavy was invited by ZAZ10TS to share personal messages on the ZAZ Corner Times Square billboards at 41St & 7Av, every night starting May 8 and for the next two weeks from 7PM-8PM. 

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Surface and Sky: Jeffrey Morabito at SFA Projects

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Monstera Deliciosa Vase, 2019

Jeffrey Morabito’s show “Birds and Flowers, Vases and Windows” is beautiful and lush and draws you in. There are vibrant colors and wandering lines, rich passages that feel like small works unto themselves–secret gardens waiting to be discovered within each larger piece. But if there are elements that delight the eye, there are ideas that tease the mind. For running through his art and practice is a sense of duality and contradiction where opposites collide and play, posing gentle questions as they merge into new concepts and forms.

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Blue in Green at Platform Project Space

Art Spiel in Dialogue with Alyssa E. Fanning on Blue in Green

Elliott Green. Inhale, Exhale, 2018, Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery

Platform Project Space, a Dumbo art venue geared to support curatorial projects by artists and independent curators, features the group exhibition “Blue in Green”, curated by artist and curator Alyssa E. Fanning. The show features paintings and drawings by 13 artists: Eric Wolf, Lee Lee Walker, Emma Tapley, Barbara Takenaga, James Siena, Alexander Ross, Joey Parlett, Andy Mister, Daniel Herwitt, Elliott Green, Nancy Goldring, Alyssa E. Fanning and Alec Dartley. Alyssa E. Fanning shares with Art Spiel her background, the art venue, and her premise for this show.

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Margaret Ann Withers – In Her Own Skin

Margaret Ann Withers, Happy and Absurd were out roughhousing in the field before dinner; 2018, acrylic gouache, watercolor, ink on paper, 22″x30″, photo courtesy of Margaret Ann Withers.

Margaret Ann Withers‘ drawings and paintings burst with energetic gestures, exuberant colors, and bio-morphic shapes. Altogether these elements fuse into imaginative landscapes resembling a child’s play in Surreal terrains.  The artist shares with Art Spiel her ideas, process, and current projects.

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Nota Bene with @postuccio [v]


The Painting Center, Present Company, Talking Pictures, NURTUREart, Slag, SOHO20, M. David & Co., Fresh Window, Studio 10

The Painting Center

I’ve been looking at and occasionally commenting on the virtues and various points of particular interest in Alannah Farrell’s lusciously pictorial, sometimes lushly lusty paintings for a number of years now, and one thing I’ve enjoyed noting is that there seems often to be something stealthily, furtively, sometimes perhaps a bit serpentinely surreptitious about many of her works. 

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