Contemporary Art and Culture
In her paintings CT based painter Polly Shindler takes a close look at lived-in spaces – interiors with furniture of different periods, textiles with colorful patterns, flooring with different textures. Here spaces are typically void of people and at the same time breath with a sense of human occupancy.
Continue reading “Polly Shindler: Place on Material”
Dibnah in Lights is hard to miss. The name of that legendary Yorkshire steeplejack flashing in red, white, and blue bulbs against the green felt backdrop of a repurposed snooker table is the first piece that greets you as you walk through Grove Collective’s doors. This piece by Mitch Vowles, a sculptor who works with found objects to draw out their cultural and personal contexts, nestles easily amongst Connor Murgatroyd’s pastel-hued still life paintings of anthuriums, signet rings, Sinatra albums and a scaffolders A-Z, and film photographer Alfie White’s hand-printed images of boys at Brixton bus stops, on Tottenham blocks, and playing in Burgess Park.
Continue reading “History’s Shadow Marks the Beginning at Grove Collective”
Meg Atkinson‘s paintings resemble puzzles open to multiple solutions. Her imagery is embedded with associative literary and visual layers, as clues to an open-ended riddle. Meg Atkinson shares with Art Spiel what brought her to art, as well as the way she has developed her approach to mark-making, space, gird, and color.
Continue reading “Meg Atkinson – Painting as a Leap of Faith”
I haven’t seen Rachel MacFarlane’s painting Sliver (2020). It would be reasonable to assume that I had, because Sliver is the centerpiece of Paradise, the show that this review is about. In fact, Sliver is the only painting in Paradise.
Continue reading “Rachel MacFarlane’s Paradise at Super Dutchess Gallery”
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.
Continue reading “Surface and Sky: Jeffrey Morabito at SFA Projects”
Ashley Norwood Cooper is having a solo painting show at First Street Gallery in NYC. The show title, “The Likes of Us,” is taken from a line in “Waiting for Godot,” about the moon looking down on our ordinary lives. The first thing that caught my attention in Cooper’s work was the just right mix of raw quality and subtle sensibility to detail, depicting narratives that both intimate and universal. In this interview the artist talks about her process of painting from the imagination, her approach to color, and how she got to art.
Continue reading “Ashley Norwood Cooper – Grappling with Color of the Ordinary”In Valerie Hegarty’s work, autobiography, history, and art history merge seamlessly into engaging installations with a distinct sense of place – visceral and subtle, layered and focused. An inquisitive rigor runs through her work, stirring in the viewer an appetite for more. Valerie Hegarty shared with Art Spiel some thoughts on art making, her own art journey, and some of her upcoming projects.
Kanad Chakrabarti’s sense of cultural rootlessness translates into his video and installation work in complex and thought provoking ways, combining analytical approaches with visceral sensibility. After a stimulating conversation about his installation work at SpringBreak art fair, curated by Jason Andrew from Norte Maar, we had the following interview. Continue reading “Kanad Chakrabarti: Sites of Exchange”