13.11.09
A Great LOUISE FISHMAN Painting
at Lennon Weinberg
8.11.09
Studio Visit: KAZIMIRA RACHFAL
It is always an exciting privilege to visit another artist's studio, to see work in progress, or finished work that has never been shown, and an environment that reflects working and thinking processes. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Kazimira Rachfal in the fantastic Soho studio she shares with her husband, painter Eric Holzman and their son. Eric was savvy enough to acquire this loft in the late '70s, just before the real estate boom priced these classic spaces out of reach of most artists. In addition to being extremely warm and generous people, Kazimira and Eric are dedicated hard working painters doing wonderful work.
Kazimira Rachfal's recent paintings are intimate in scale, and highly sensuous in their humble materiality. Working with an endless variety of simple geometric configurations, she goes about creating delicately layered surfaces and finely intuited relations among colors, shapes, edges and planes. Thin veils of oil paint are applied, scraped, dripped to form subtly colored accumulations with an equilibrium that is slightly askew, and always unified by the richness of the surface and the focus of a simple dynamic relation. In one area of her studio, Kazimira has collected various small bits of paper and fragments found on the street, each an example of the sort of integral happenstance that she notices in the world, and which she values as a source of release from convention. Indeed that release from convention is a key element in the resonance of Kazimira's work, in her dedicated mindful search for direct experience, and in the dialogue that occurs between the intensity of her intent and the apparent offhandedness of her process. She repeatedly achieves a plain-spoken visual poetry that is disarming in its simplicity, and in its beauty.
Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 10 x 10 inches
Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 14 x 11 inches
Kazimira Rachfal, studio wall7.11.09
HELMUT FEDERLE at Peter Blum
An exhibition of five new paintings by Helmut Federle, titled Scratching Away the Surface, is at Peter Blum in Soho through January 2, 2010. These small understated paintings are installed to powerful effect in Blum's cavernous shoebox shaped space, with many meters of white wall between each work, so the paintings at first read as tiny dark spots punctuating an expanse of white. This separation serves to isolate each painting as a distinct moment, pulling us up close and eliminating the others from view, while simultaneously activating the whole space like a choreographed arena. The five paintings are all variations on a geometric spiral image that originates with light near the center of the canvas, and layer by layer, becomes darker and denser moving out to the edges. The paint is carefully scumbled in many thin layers with the tooth of the canvas causing surface irregularities as it catches small hunks of paint. Within such a focused program, Federle achieves a remarkable variety of effects from one work to the next, from dry schematic precision to fluid atmospheric space. These are rather modest paintings that collaborate with each other and with the gallery space to make a rather grand statement -- a metaphysical passage, stark and searching, penetrating toward light.
6.11.09
DON CHRISTENSEN: New Work

Check out Don Christensen's exquisite new work on his new website.
29.10.09
18.10.09
MARA HELD at Kurnatowski
10.10.09
6.10.09
5.10.09
COLOR-TIME-SPACE
at Lohin Geduld & Janet Kurnatowski
Acknowledged affinities between painting and music must surely be prehistoric in origin -- being, along with movement/dance, among the most elemental of human impulses. Of course abstract painting has always been talked about in musical terms, specifically aligned with music as a parallel language. This analogy has mostly been perpetuated not by critics but by artists themselves because indeed the process of manipulating the formal dynamics of the two ineffable substances, color and sound, is virtually the same.
The postulation of abstract painting as a "musical" idiom is the theme of two simultaneous shows under one title, Color-Time-Space, at Lohin Geduld in Chelsea and Janet Kurnatowski in Brooklyn through October 10. Curated by painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama, and drawn primarily, but not entirely, from the stables of the two galleries, this is a lively and yes, musical show of small abstract, mostly geometric, paintings. Featuring the work of 13 painters, each offering a distinct illumination of the theme, the show is more than anything a resounding affirmation of the vitality of abstract painting. Some of the many outstanding works include a reprise of new Thornton Willis paintings that we saw at Elizabeth Harris last season, the funky configurations and lustrous surfaces of Laurie Fendrich, Julie Gross' exquisite color and rhythmic circle motifs, and juicy open-ended gestural works by James Biederman. For me, the big surprise was the work of Kazimira Rachfal.
2.10.09
MARK BRADFORD & KARA WALKER
At Sikkema Jenkins
Kara Walker, 10 Years Massacre (and its Retelling) #2, 2009, 84 x 72 inches, mixed media, cut paper & acrylic on gessoed panelShowing together at Sikkema Jenkins through October 17, Mark Bradford and Kara Walker present distinct but overlapping bodies of work that resonate with the confidence of two accomplished artists in full stride. It is a rambling exhibition that features large and small scale paintings, text-based collages and a sculpture by Bradford, and large scale paintings, small collages and two new videos by Walker.
23.9.09
SLIPPERY WHEN WET at Metaphor
22.9.09
MAYA LIN at PaceWildenstein
In her first exhibition at PaceWildenstein in their 22nd Street space (through October 24), Maya Lin continues to give us expansive works of elegance and eloquence. The show consists of three pieces, each made of one material -- aluminum wire, plywood, 2x4s -- and constructed with disarming directness. All three works are manifestations of Lin's experience of landscape, both analytical and intuitive. By far the most impressive piece is "2x4 Landscape", in which she has placed more than 50,000 2x4s of varying lengths on end to form an undulating indoor landscape that rises to a 10' high hill. The piece is perfectly situated in the space with a pathway around the perimeter, and has a physical presence that is both astounding and delightful. This is pure sculpture -- the artist engaged in a deep dialogue with the physical world, enlarging and elaborating her experience with visual poetry of the highest refinement.
11.9.09
GONÇALO IVO: New Work
Gonçalo Ivo, 2009, 97 x 195 cm, oil on canvas5.9.09
REBECCA PURDUM at Dartmouth
Rebecca Purdum, Ripton 77, 2008, 16 x 16 nches, oil on board My first encounter with the work of Rebecca Purdum was her first show at Jack Tilton in 1986 -- when Tilton had just recently taken over the charged 57th Street space after the death of Betty Parsons. Thinking now about that show, it is easy to conjure the sensation of entering, in that mid-'80s climate, the first show of a very young painter who was already deeply tapped into an elemental engagement with the painting process and tradition -- who was not playing strategy games or asserting a stance, but making the most direct and substantial paintings I had seen in a long time. She painted lush darkly colorful abstract works with her hands on a huge scale -- paintings that were powerfully moving and instantly venerable. A few years later, in what seemed like utter disregard for her "career", she relocated to Vermont, where she still resides. During the past almost 25 years she has shown rarely and exclusively with Jack Tilton (not a bad gig) while forging her way deeper and deeper into an encompassing symbiosis with her process, and with painting as an entity. Remarkably, the longer she lives in the country, the tougher her paintings get. The sensate clouds of swirling color that characterized those earliest pieces have evolved into stark undulating fields of raw sensation -- pure paint and surface -- ecstatic touch.
The Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College will be presenting, from September 29 - October 25, what looks to be a Rebecca Purdum mini-retrospective that highlights some of the toughest early works and is heavy on large recent work. From the catalogue I just received, this looks like a knock-out show of haunting enigmatic paintings that confirm Rebecca as a singular and important (still young) painter who has sustained a rare depth and focus over a quarter century.
In 1997, I was honored to curate a show of Rebecca's paintings at Marywood University. Click here to read the catalogue essay. And click here to read a wonderful lecture/statement by Rebecca from Middlebury College, 2007.
20.8.09
12.8.09
MARGARET NEILL - Drawings
At Pelavin Projects
Margaret Neill has completed a beautiful new series of charcoal drawings, being presented as an online project by Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts in Tribeca. These are deeply sensuous works with dense black shapes built from layers of charcoal rubbed into the surface of the paper, and white spaces activated by charcoal smudges and erasures. The images are simple curves and intersecting geometries, fragments of infinite configurations that form focused interactions of light and dark -- an elegant fusion of physicality and grace.
8.8.09
Summer - Light & Color
Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ksenija), 1985, fluorescent light, 96" high1.8.09
FEMALE GAZE: WOMEN LOOK AT WOMEN
At Cheim & Read
25.7.09
18.7.09
MOTHERWELL - OPEN in London
Robert Motherwell, Untitled (Ultramarine & Ochre Open), 1973, 69 x 44 inches, acrylic on canvas, Bernard Jacobson Gallery11.7.09
PAMELA FARRELL's New Photos

TERRI BROOKS
6.7.09
5.7.09
The Baptistery & San Miniato, Florence







The exterior of the Baptistry is also amazing. It is of course famous for the Ghiberti bronze doors on the north side -- all polished and shiny, they are constantly surrounded by a herd of tourists. But around each corner of the octagonal building is a remarkable set of niches and relations created by the distinctive green & white marble.

High on a hill overlooking Florence is another magnificent place, San Miniato Al Monte, completed in 1207 and formally influenced by the Baptistry. Here we see a large-scale improvisation on many of the elements that make the Baptistry such a special place.
4.7.09
Aesthetics of Decay - Part 2:
Cimabue & Giotto at Assisi
& Uccello's Green Cloister
Giotto, Sermon to the Birds, 1296-1304, Upper Church, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi
Paolo Uccello, Scenes from the Flood, 1432, Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
3.7.09
2.7.09
Mercato Centrale - Florence
A vegetarian's paradise
And we won't even mention the coffee.
29.6.09
Aesthetics of Decay - Part 1:
Walls of Italy

27.6.09
Back from FLORENCE
I've just returned from my too-short residency in Florence with lots of stuff to show and tell. To begin, just a little taste of the magnificent visual richness that permeates this great city. Having spent quite a bit of time in Florence over the past ten years, I feel very much at home in this place. I will be posting images and observations from Italy in the coming days.
25.6.09
Lisa Pressman's Blog
I return from Italy tomorrow....sadly. But having been here without a computer, I've got lots of stuff to post when I get home.
10.6.09
SOPHIE MUNNS - New Blog
There's a great new blog on the block by Australian artist Sophie Munns. It is packed full of wonderful diverse images, and focuses on the richness of visual experience in all its aspects.
9.6.09
THORNTON DIAL & BILL ARNETT
On the Kalm Report
Mr. James Kalm ventures way off his beaten path (and his bike) to Atlanta for a visit to the Bill Arnett Collection, which includes hundreds of amazing pieces by Thornton Dial. James' video gives us not only a great look at this phenomenal sprawling collection, but also features a remarkable interview with Arnett, a scholar of African American culture. His encapsulation of the cultural and aesthetic importance of this work is excellent. Check it out.
4.6.09
HELEN MIRANDA WILSON in Boston
I picked this up from Two Coats of Paint -- thanks Sharon. Helen Miranda Wilson is showing a group of new works on paper at Victoria Munroe in Boston through June 20. I assume she approaches these new gouaches in the same way as her earlier horizontal stripe paintings, building the image intuitively one color at a time, probably starting in the center. These new pieces are real beauties -- focused color meditations, human and universal. More images on the gallery website.
31.5.09
DON VOISINE at McKenzie
Don Voisine, Connection, 2007, 17" x 26", oil on wood
Don Voisine, Sidekick, 2008, 36" x 18", oil on woodThe primary principle at work in the paintings of Don Voisine, thru June 6 at McKenzie Fine Art, is compression -- like the stuff that oozes out between your fingers if you squeeze a handful of mud, the action in Voisine's paintings happens at the pressure points between opposing forces. The compositions themselves are embodiments of this pressurized tension, colorful and speedy around the edges, becoming slower and more dense at their black center. Voisine is able to wring an amazing amount of variation from very few well-chosen elements. Most engaging is the variety of blacks -- purples, greens, blues, reds -- all masquerading as black, with wonderful contrasts between matte and glossy surfaces that change as you walk around the piece. These blacks are activated by strips of pastel or sometimes almost day-glo color of varying widths aligning the verticle or horizontal edges. The X formed by the two intersecting black slabs on a white ground causes a dance of triangular shapes between the black and the bright color. Voisine has found a universe in Malevich's tilted square.
26.5.09
Ranking Reverb #1:
MARTIN, MARDEN, PALERMO, TRUITT
Brice Marden's early monochromes and color panel paintings were at once conceptually rigorous and deeply sensual. His heavily worked oil and beeswax surfaces were inhabited by rich hybrid or fugitive colors arrived at through a process that was steeped in tradition and buzzing with intelligent intuition. As his configurations became more complex, his color became more adventurous, and impeccably refined -- and always surprising.
In the late 60s, Blinky Palermo arrived at an exquisite integration of color and material with his fabric paintings -- not really paintings, but colored fabric mounted on stretchers. He would continue to develop these concerns, exploring the inherent properties of various materials, shapes and colors, evolving into his last and most important work, To the People of New York City, which was shown at Heiner Friedrich in NY just after the artist's death in 1977. It was a concise group of paintings on aluminum panels with simple paired combinations of red, yellow and black, now permanently installed at Dia Beacon. In it's original setting at the Friedrich Gallery, the installation was a highly charged arrangement of stark and beautiful relations that revealed the mysterious associative power of color and material in an entirely new way.
Ranking Reverb #1
Agnes Martin, The Sea, 2003, 60" x 60", acrylic & graphite on canvas
Agnes Martin, Gratitude, 2001, 60" x 60", acrylic & graphite on canvas
Brice Marden, The Dylan Painting, 1966, 60" x 120", oil & beeswax on canvas
Brice Marden, Grove Group IV, 1976, 72" x 108", Two panels, oil & beeswax on canvas
Brice Marden, Elements V, 1982, 84" x 51", Four panels, oil on canvas
Anne Truitt, Catawba, 1962, 42" x 60" x 11", acrylic on wood
Anne Truitt, Watauga, 1962, 46" x 56" x 7", acrylic on wood17.5.09
Rothko Chapel
I have just returned from another brief visit to Houston to do some business at Gremillion & Co., and spend some time with Ron Gremillion and all my friends and colleagues at the gallery. On my first day there, I had a little down time, and decided to make another visit to the Rothko Chapel -- since I've been thinking about those late Rothkos lately, and every time I see the chapel works, they offer some new perception or moment. It was a glorious day with bright clear sunlight and some floating clouds. As always, entering the chapel was a drastic reality shift from the brightness and heat of the outdoors. The place was empty except for a greeter at the front desk and an extremely conspicuous guard sitting in a chair inside the chapel. In addition to the rough hewn benches, the floor of the chapel was strewn with small mats with little round pillows in the middle -- obviously to accommodate lotus sitters, but very distracting interruptions of the space. Their presence made me think about the dichotomy between the paintings, and the space as a "chapel" in which the paintings exist as part of a devotional or meditative environment. Of course the idea of the chapel came first, and the paintings were conceived specifically for that context, both in terms of physicality and content -- just as Rothko was chosen for the project presumably because of the compatibility between his work and the idea of the chapel. But to my mind, the paintings have outlived the original context -- like the Giottos in the Arena Chapel or the Caravaggios in San Luigi -- their sustained importance as paintings has rendered their ecumenical role quaint if not obsolete. The notion of attaching religiosity to Rothko's paintings is a warm and fuzzy product of a past era, and is in reality diametrically opposed to the utter anarchy of the works themselves. These paintings declare a reality of vastness and flux in which any notion of certainty, any doctrine or dogma is patently absurd.
On this day, the light in the chapel was particularly changeable. I sat on a bench for a while watching as the paintings transformed from huge active painterly surfaces revealed by the full (filtered) sunlight, to monolithic almost black slab/spaces devoid of surface as a cloud passed overhead. A few people came in, some alone and some in pairs, and I noticed that they hardly looked at the paintings -- rather, they sat and read the little brochure, or just sort of glanced around for a few minutes then left. The quiet stillness of the chapel can indeed be conducive to an undifferentiated state -- only because the paintings perform a strange trick of temporarily receding from physicality, of becoming absorbed into an experience of the space as a whole, reinforcing their ambiguity. Then just as suddenly, they reassert their fierce presence. For me, the less successful of the works are the two triptychs on the east and west walls with the elevated center panels -- they now seem almost mannered, and pandering to the ideological precepts of the chapel. The verticle painting with the floating black rectangle on the south wall advances Rothko's trademark image to a powerful stark intensity. But to my mind, the paintings on the four corner walls, along with the giant tour de force triptych on the north wall, are Rothko's greatest work. The sheer scale of these paintings is unfathomable -- all monochromes with different variations of layered washed surfaces and deep dull purples. Here Rothko repudiates any preconceptions about painting's parameters, and uses the chapel context as a catalyst to achieve an extravagant radicality. These are without doubt the most portentous paintings of the NY School generation; and their bold singularity, in sharp contrast to the ideological limits of their devotional setting, places them among the most important paintings of any era.
9.5.09
LANCE RUTLEDGE
I don't know much about Lance Rutledge, but there is a recent interview with him by Jon Lutz at The Old Gold. He is also showing tonight, May 9, at Studio 11 in L.I.C. in a group show called Central & Remote that also includes Carrie Pollack and many others. His paintings feature a finely tuned awareness of the poetic potency of words and images, as well as a great sense of humor. I particularly enjoy the slippages that occur in the verbal phrases, and how the seemingly unrelated words and images are mashed together to create surprising off-balance meaning. He has mastered a Twombly-esque artlessness that is supremely artful, making these paintings operate as both hermetic narratives and sensuous objects.
1.5.09
MARK WETHLI at Red Flagg
I just encountered the work of Mark Wethli on Kate Beck's blog (thanks Kate). He is showing a group of mostly small paintings on found wood panels. The configurations are beautifully direct improvisational responses to the format, the surfaces are activated by the scars of their previous utilitarian existence, and the colors reference the folk art tradition -- an interesting hybrid. At Red Flagg Gallery in Chelsea through May 16.
26.4.09
BLANK CITY Premiers
at the Tribeca Film Festival
Last night, Laura and I were privileged to attend the world premier of Celine Danhier's BLANK CITY at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is a beautifully directed documentary montage about the underground cinema scene in New York in the late '70s and early '80s. The soundtrack features a great selection of music from that era by Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Contortions, DNA, Theoretical Girls, my old band The Dance, and many others. The narrative is carried by a series of fantastic interviews with many of the key players in No Wave cinema and music, including Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, Beth & Scott B, James Chance -- and an incredible collection of film clips from long lost archives -- films so obscure that they may have only been shown once in somebody's apartment, but were nevertheless at the forefront of the fiercely iconoclastic creative groundswell of that moment in New York. Danhier's film gloriously and accurately portrays the scene's gritty, dangerous, druggy adrenalin, and while convincingly asserting the truth, courage, and historical importance of all those uncompromising projects, also erases any trace of nostalgia for that time.
23.4.09
TIM McFARLANE at Bridgette Mayer
In its last week is a show of recent paintings by Tim McFarlane at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia - closing on April 25. Consisting of a group of small panel paintings and a few larger works on paper, the show is perfectly scaled for the gallery space, and presents a great variety of Tim's trademark knitted gestural fields in dynamic and colorful compositions. In most of the paintings, the knitted field takes on the presence of a discrete organic shape which is held in a kind of suspended animation by the edges of the panel. Sometimes two or more fields overlap or form layers of repetitive weaving marks, with drips and wet-into-wet viscosity asserting the physicality of the surfaces. The most recent pieces tend to be the most stark and direct, often using the unpainted wood grain of the panel as the ground. In these works, Tim seems to be relinquishing some of the lushness of previous work in favor of a more straight ahead focus on process -- more interest in the larger relation between the knitted field and the ground rather than in effects of color nuances. Going a step further, the most recent thing in the show is an ongoing site-specific piece which the artist worked on throughout the duration of the exhibition. In a small but unique closet space, about 6 ft square with about a 10 ft vaulted ceiling, he has engaged in a daily process of revision and elaboration that has transformed the little space into a site of intense obsessive intervention. Beginning with slate black walls and ceiling, every inch of surface in this room has been inscribed with marks using chalk, dry pigments, and white paint -- each day's work being overlayed by the next, with no specific endgame, just total commitment to the spontaneity of the process. The result is a fascinating expansion of McFarlane's practice beyond the containment of the rectangle -- a work in which his repetitions feed on themselves and multiply, ignoring edges, engulfing and surrounding, as though we've literally entered the artist's head.














































































