Lola Montes Schnabel: Love Before Intimacy

There is a koan that states, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Thinking about Buddha as something outside of oneself is creating preconceived ideas and is, hence, antithetical to one's awakening. Looking at the work of Lola Montes Schnabel is a little like that. It is hard not to think of the giant reputation of Julian Schnabel, her father, looming over her work. Even if you tried, it might be kind of like not trying to think about elephants, and, well -- you get the point. Schnabel has created a suite of paintings, stylistically not so much indebted to the Neo-Expressionist movement as developing from it, that are worth considering. Read more »

Jane Wilson: New Paintings

It is a rare gift to create a feeling of relief, of spiritual up-lift simply by painting a vast sky above a sliver of a horizon. The new paintings by Jane Wilson at DC Moore Gallery are a perfect example of this effect. And despite the low percentage of earthbound elements in most of Ms. Wilson’s work, her art has a very distinct ability of grounding the viewer. It is as if she offers an open invitation to proceed safely upward, to leave your fears, your day-to-day responsibilities and move to a place where you can float and experience anything from the electric energy of a pending storm, to the serenity of harmless cluster of white clouds without letting go completely all ties and comforts. Read more »

Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Duke University Press) and the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is an associate teaching professor in MFA Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. She is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and Marvelli Gallery in New York City where she will have a one-person exhibition in March 2012. Read more »

Howard Hodgkin

James Lord once wrote of Proust that "he realized, if ever anybody did, how the recapture of time gone by can create an infinite future." This pursuit of memory, both vivid and buried, has been depicted by painters quite often in the form of the sea. Jackson Pollock's "Full Fathom Five" (1947), with its skeins of watery paint covering the detritus of the studio (keys, coins, cigarettes, and so on) like buried ocean treasure, stands as one of the prime examples of such work. Howard Hodgkin's recent paintings extend this "search of memory" further.  Read more »

Scott Grodesky was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1968. He lives and works in Long Island City, Queens, New York, and teaches painting at SUNY Albany. Grodesky’s most well-known body of work depicts life in his neighborhood, including his wife and children and the surrounding buildings and landscape. He employs reverse perspective as a tool for investigating new relationships with forms and narratives in painting.

Recent solo exhibitions have included Sunday L.E.S., New York (2009); Galleria Glance, Turin, Italy (2008); Baumgartner Gallery, New York (2000, 2007); Daniel Weinberg, Los Angeles, (2004); LFL Gallery, New York (2003). Read more »

Edgar Degas: Degas and the Nude

Of all the artists who came to be known as Impressionists, with their emphasis on the effects of light and color -- plein air painting -- and focus on outdoor motifs, it was Edgar Degas who held onto the tradition of the figure as both subject and inspiration. In this aspect of his work he was, in some ways, the last artist of his generation to incorporate the long-standing belief that the depiction of people, whether heroic, iconic, or merely quotidian, was the noblest achievement of a painter.

When asked why he painted the ballet, Degas said, "Because it is all that is left us of the combined movement of the Greeks." This justification is what one would expect, based on his unwavering interest in the subject of the figure. Degas could see a Venus or Nike adjusting a sandal in the ballerina fixing a slipper ("Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot" [1896–1911], shown at left). Similarly, in 1856 he saw the Parthenon figures and Attic vase painting and translated those into images of the dancer Eugénie Fiocre. Like the Greeks, he believed in the primacy of the human form as the wellspring of art. His "Scene of War in the Middle Ages" (1863-65) and "Young Spartans Exercising" (1860-62) drew their compositions from Greek histories. Read more »

Paul McCarthy: The Dwarves, The Forests

Once upon a time, as a queen sat sewing at her window, she pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell on the snow gathered on the ebony windowsill. As she looked at the blood she said, "Oh, how I wish I had a daughter who had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair black as ebony." Soon after, the queen gave birth to a baby girl whose skin was white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair black as ebony. She named her Snow White. The Dwarves, The Forests is the first exhibition of sculptures to come from Paul McCarthy's recent exploration of the classic 19th century German folk tale Snow White (Schneewittchen) and of the modern reinterpretation, Disney's 1937 animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Read more »

On Duty: Odermatt, Metinides and Weegee

The first time I saw the color photograph "Untitled (primer plano de mujer rubia arollada e impactada contra un poste, Ciudad de Mexico)" (1979) [at left] by Enrique Metinides, it was in a press communication. At that time, I was reminded of the Alfred Hitchcock film Frenzy. This reaction, I suspect, was a coping method -- a way for me to imagine that it was not real by thinking it was a film still. You see, the photograph is of a woman who lies bleeding, dead or dying, crammed between two metal posts, a victim of a car crash. Next to her, a medic offers a jacket -- a gesture that elicits no response whatsoever in the victim. Read more »

Maurizio Cattelan: All

The ironic thing about blasphemy is that, in order for there to be any cathartic meaning for the blasphemer, he must first believe in the subject or object he is debasing. Like, really believe in it. De Sade’s endless accounts of nun rapes and shooting loads into the Eucharist would hold little interest, in their own right, if we were not so intrigued by how devout a believer he truly was. Maurizio Cattelan intrigues us for similar reasons, but to lesser effect. For all his posturing, à la Marcel Duchamp, he constantly returns to themes of a religious nature that belie his crueler intentions. His draped, marble figures suggest both Lazarus and Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). A horse hangs below a hand-lettered sign that reads “INRI” (Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm), a donkey carries a TV set, and Pope John Paul II is felled by a giant meteorite (The Ninth Hour, 1999). His recurring use of taxidermy gives us animals resurrected, and a small, penitent Adolph Hitler (Him, 2001) depicts the dictator seeking redemption. Read more »

Lucio Pozzi was born in 1935 in Milan, Italy. After living a few years in Rome, where he studied architecture, he came to the United States in 1962 as a guest of the Harvard International Summer Seminar. He then settled in New York and attained U.S. citizenship. He now shares his time between his Hudson (NY) and Valeggio s/M (VR) studios.

In 1978 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibited his early videotapes in one of the first single-artist exhibitions of the Projects:Video series. He occasionally writes and has taught at the Cooper Union, Yale Graduate Sculpture Program, Princeton University, and the Maryland Institute of Art. He currently is an instructor at the MFA and BFA programs of the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and at the Venice Biennale (American Pavilion) in 1980. His art is represented in various private and  public collections. Read more »

Jonathan Meese: Hot Earl Green Sausage Tea Barbie (First Flush)

Just in the nick of time Jonathan Meese has rolled up like a panzer division, bringing his ribald "Dictatorship of Art" to New York. Meese's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to exhibitions hasn't changed, and here we get paintings, bronze sculpture, video, and a performance, War "Saint Just (First Flash)." Read more »

Thomas Lyon Mills

"...where the temperature and humidity are unchanging, I share space with eight-inch phosphorescent mantises, translucent spiders and tiny moths that, attracted to my lights, cling to my clothes and hair."

These are the words of artist Thomas Lyons Mills, referring to the Roman catacombs – a place where he has spent countless hours accumulating visual and emotional data in both his sketchbook and his mind. The resulting mixed media meanderings through those most sacred of spaces yield masterful renderings of timeless textures that cover curious corridors riddled with subtle life forms and ages-old death. Like an in-between place, Purgatory, the waking dream or your everyday day dream, Mills's most effectively awakens with his art, your subconscious, your fears, your phobias, and your fantasies and breathes a thick atmosphere of sights, sounds, smells, and sighs that travel right through to your core.  Read more »

Peter Williams: Midnight Waltz in D Minor

One of the problematic legacies of Modernism was its emphasis on originality, youth, and the myth of the artist who sprang sui generis into a recognizable, signature style. There were rare exceptions, such as Picasso and Matisse, who remained in the canon and were allowed to mature and develop their works past their youthful experiments and achieve a late body of work. Admittedly, the fact that they lived to be ninety sort of bludgeoned the historians and critics into pretty much accepting whatever they did just because they refused to die. On the other hand, de Kooning lived just as long, and his constant morphing of styles proved to be equally as protean but not as accepted, and his later painting was more or less dismissed until well after his death. What gets overlooked in this now familiar pattern of looking at artists is the fact that most of them go through a period of adolescence after their initial "breakthrough" works, and then they slowly hone their style. This period of artistic growth, often overlooked, is usually the most interesting of an artist's career. Read more »

Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk -- An Introspective
The Brooklyn Museum
Through January 8, 2012

Sanford Biggers gathers the imagery and sounds of Blues, the rhythm and movement of break dancing, and the costumes and theatricality of blackface routines and turns them into a very personal discourse on race and culture in our time. The exhibition centers on a large installation of a tree growing through a player piano (Blossom, 2007), which grows through the museum’s fifth-floor rotunda. With passing references to “a tree grows in Brooklyn,” nature versus culture, and Buddha's enlightenment under the bodhi tree, it drives home its point by intermittently playing “Strange Fruit,” the ode to black victims of racism made famous by Billie Holiday. Read more »

Allison Schulnik: Mound

On May 5th they isolated the strain of Virus HC-35, which became known as The Flu. On April 1st President Manson declared a State of Emergency, cleared the protesters from Zapruder Park, and issued orders for the Continuous Curfew. And the deaths came in millions. By June the food had run out, and we began to hunt the neighbors. By July the neighbors had run out, and we stayed confined to the 69th floor. Two days ago we ate Amelie. Now Katya is sitting in the living room, counting the last of the drugs on the table. Enough Neroin and Serafem to last only one person for the rest of the month. Read more »