Erika Ranee: Feelings at Duck Creek

Erika Ranee, Sunset Beach, 2024, ink, shellac and oil pastel on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

I’ve been following Erika Ranee’s work since the mid-90s after I saw a handful of her works in person throughout a collector’s home. I recall a few key elements from that earlier work: medium to large scale, painted using a poured technique, and figurative or rather stenciled elements like references of figures and faces. Early on, Ranee’s work recalled a similarity to Donald Baechler’s. Think of a series of expressively painted applications layered upon one another and then codifying with a silhouette or stenciled image atop the coated process. I lost track of Ranee’s work for over a decade, then I came across it when she had a studio at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Program in 2011. I’ve been following her work and have had the pleasure of seeing it evolve steadily. Since my first encounter with the work, she has done away with a direct reference to figuration and seems to use titles to locate outside influences. Her work has grown, and her career is blossoming.

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Vom Abend, Joe Bradley at David Zwirner

A room with paintings on the wall

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Installation view, Joe Bradley: Vom Abend, David Zwirner, New York, 2024. Photo courtesy of the gallery

The ten paintings in Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s current show at David Zwirner, measure up to 93 x 120 inches and are all dated 2023-2024.  They are big and, with one exception, are in landscape orientations.  Framed with white oak strips, they have stately feel, yet they are hardly genteel.  They are full of crusty skins of dry paint that seem randomly attached to the surfaces. They are creased and folded.  They reek of oil paint.  And while the color is buoyant, joyous even, they are also dark.  Bradley isn’t afraid of black, and he explores shit brown with an alarming gusto. There are passages where the paint seems to have been aggressively ripped off the surface of the canvas, only to be tenderly painted over again.  There are staccato stippling marks.  There is erasure and heavy impasto in stretches.  Although this may sound like the paintings are heavily labored and full of themselves, they aren’t. And careful examination reveals worlds to explore.

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Paul Behnke – a Champion of Painting


Portrait of Paul Behnke in the studio with Gloria’s Guardian, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 60 inches, photo courtesy of Robin Stout.

Paul Behnke is a champion of painting – and he does it with evident gusto. His paintings come from idiosyncrasies, life experience, and a process that begins as intuitive, mixed with periods of sharp critical gaze. His paintings have evolved from early contained and minimalistic bold-color geometries, to more recent chaotic forms and layered complexity, at times almost explosive.

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