Paintings in New York January and February

While demands of the studio, and preparing for my upcoming show have not left time for blog posts, there has been a steady stream of great painting visible in New York since the beginning of the new year. So here is an abbreviated rundown of some of the highlights... and more in the coming weeks.

Robert Ryman at Dia

 Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Amy Sillman - one from a wall of black & white paper pieces

Doug Ohlson at Washburn

Logan Grider in a group show at David Findlay Jr

Matt Phillips at Steven Harvey

Emily Berger at the UBS Building lobby gallery

One of many wonderful works in The Onward of Art: American Abstract Artists 80th Anniversary, 

curated by Karen Wilkin

Terry Winters in a group show at Matthew Marks

David Row at Loretta Howard

David Row - Detail

Al Held at Cheim & Read

Al Held - Detail

TERRY WINTERS at Matthew Marks

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures, 2011, 88 x 112 inches, oil on linen

There has been a run of luscious painting in Chelsea this season, and right up there is a group of new works by Terry Winters at Matthew Marks Gallery, through April 14, 2012. The show, titled Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures, & Notebook, features 14 large recent paintings, and in a smaller space down the street, a group of fascinating collages that illuminate Winters' working and thinking process. Using tessellations and knot theory as a starting point, Winters builds complex organic systems of shapes and colors that accumulate in layers of floating, overlapping and interconnecting planes -- all emerging from a soupy painting space. At a distance, the complex patterns undulate and vibrate with carefully calibrated color resonances. As we move up close, the rich surfaces reveal an intuitive process of constant revision -- sensual physical presences.

Terry Winters, Cricket Music, 2010, 88 x 112 inches, oil on linen

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures (6), 2011, 80 x 76 inches, oil on linen

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures (12), 2011, 80 x 76 inches, oil on lines

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures (4), 2011, 80 x 76 inches, oil on linen

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures (4), Detail

TERRY WINTERS at Matthew Marks

Terry Winters, Knotted Graphs/1, 2008, 77 x 98 inches, oil on linen

It's an unusually great month for painting in Chelsea and beyond. I'll try to discuss some of the high points including Mary Heilmann, Joan Mitchell and others in upcoming posts. But for now -- it has been quite a while since I've seen a new group of Terry Winters paintings, and his latest batch at Matthew Marks certainly does not disappoint. This work is a major departure from the dense linear layers that formed an almost static inpenetrable screen in Winters' late '90s work. The new pieces actually seem to be more directly related to the "pod" configurations of the mid-'80s, except that rather than the deep soupy atmospheric space of those works, Winters is using a grid structure to activate a lively and dynamic interplay of image, surface and color in a frontal presentation space. The real depth of these works is found in layer upon layer of translucent surface, pentimenti, and just plain luscious painting. The "image" is an endlessly fluid and changeable set of relations that mutate visibly throughout the duration of the painting process. By limiting himself to repitition of a knot-like configuration within the stable grid structure, Winters re-envigorates his unique ability to manipulate pictorial space (and paint), within, through, around the grid with masterful fluency. And within the parameters of this program, each individual work is invested with a distinctive focus and color world -- wringing maximum richness from each variation. These works are generous, open and unapologetically opulent -- abstract paintings in which the subject and the object breathe together, sharing one inseparable physicality.