Art Review

Remembering To Not Forget

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:48:14 +0000

Remembering To Not Forget Robert Cochrane June 4, 2026 - 15:48

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ANDREW HEARD - I Want To Be Good

Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London

Stories were integral to the art of Andrew Heard. His panoramic canvases, festooned with jewels of detail, witty and profane, celebrated low culture in a highly artistic fashion. He trawled the gutters of memory, mostly his own. But these mirrored a sense of Britishness culturally in decline. A residue for others and a celebration of such sorrows, that murkiness of recall that we all harbor. His was a world of flickering monochrome and fading technicolor. The saltiness of snippets and vulgarity. Flea-pit warmth and the grace inherent within a half-remembered moment. 'Nudge! Nudge! Wink! Wink! Say No More! Know What I Mean?' Heard embraced not only double entendres but the 'in your face' blatancy of the singular kind, his works resembling posters for movies of the mind. Festooned with slogans, his magpie's sensibility became a patchwork of modernity contrived from a fading past. Sadly, till recently. Heard had fallen victim to the callousness of gallerists and art historians, those arbiters of taste with their fingers on the absent pulse and residue of the dead.

I Want To Be Good is shockingly Heard's first solo London show since the memorial show that followed his death, aged 34, in 1993. It encapsulates sublime talent and supreme relevance. The work remains fresh and engaging. Stark and still challenging, there pertains an elegiac air to his paintings, with an inherent sense of clever mischief. Early efforts were largely black-and-white confections, followed by a period in which the work was highlighted with splashes of red and blue, whilst his final phase was a cavalcade of color. He never quite wished to be easily categorized, was a maverick soul of beautiful contradictions. A public schoolboy who perfectly assimilated the guise of the skinhead, tattoos and braces, a neat collaring of downward mobility, attitude as a sense of otherness. His impeccable manners and accent belied his origins, though visually he had traveled well beyond such elements of conformity. His sports car, British of course, was the final jarring sight gag to accompany his impeccable attire. His interior world was populated by minor television-aries, actors of the eccentric and effete kind, especially Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor from the Carry-On series of UK comedies. He included all three in his canvases. Hymns to a former time. Terry Thomas and Arthur Askey also found their place on these canvases

One day, on a trek around Brick Lane Market, a favorite Sunday haunt of his, he guided me down a side street. "There's something here I want to show you," his sole clue for the self-explanatory epiphany that awaited me. At the end of the alley was a burger cart overseen by a blonde allure-ess of indeterminate age and extraordinary panache in a spotless fitted white housecoat, her hair, pure peroxide, not one strand out of place, her bust accentuated by the cut and shape of her outfit. From lips, sinfully red, she gushed, "Whaddaya Want Boys?" In awe, we ordered chips and sat gazing at a wall opposite this apparition of East End beauty, like a pair of schoolboys in utter disbelief. Andrew turned to me and smiled: "She's amazing, isn't she? I always come here just to see her." As we said our goodbyes, we were airily informed that she was in her final weeks of trade. We were both somewhat crestfallen. A few weeks later, I asked him if he'd seen her since. He said sadly, "When I looked there recently, the space was empty." It could have been a perfect parable for one of his paintings.

Dominic Johynson is to be applauded for curating this salient show, which encapsulates the salt and sweetness of Heard as a creator. It is a perfect thumbnail sketch, an entrée for a wider menu, and a reminder that many other treasures are yet to be remembered. There is "You Are Wretched. You Are Scum," is an overtly challenging cityscape at night, bookended by a pair of shirtless skinheads, as well as the early piece of camp froth from 1980, "Cowboy Can Can," which has a row of identical cowboys carouselling across the canvas in all their gharish glory. The late-period 'Melancholy,' when Heard was at his most affecting, has a pensive and unsettled image of the actress Deborah Kerr surrounded by flowers, a perfectly unsettling tondo juxtaposition of beauty and distress. The title picture in the show contrasts a fifties couple in their dream kitchen lovingly viewing a muscle man as a jack in the box on their gleaming work surface, whilst below the transformation sequence from man to werewolf, unsettles these elements of domestic bliss. Heard's work has survived largely due to the maintaining of his archive via his partner Chris Hall which has allowed it to be discovered. Many artists of that era saw their archives squandered by dealers or destroyed by family members. Andrew's friends, the iconic artists Gilbert & George, write movingly in their introduction for the show's catalog

'Andrew and his pictures were very happy and very sad, very nostalgic but also up-to-date, aggressive and gentle, simplistic and complex, lifeful and deathful. His pictures were filled with a warmth of human love and an extreme and unusual beauty. For us, he was a fantastic artist who built a life out of his own imagination and sense of reality. For this, he lived.'

Heard's work echoes the early creations of his friend David Hockney, Peter Blake, and the only recently re-evaluated Pauline Doty. There are also shades of Warhol and of his direct American contemporaries, Basquiat and Keith Haring. He was an endless advocate for David Robilliard, the artist/poet, one-time lover and friend with whom he shared studio and apartment space at 4 Garden Walk in the East End. David died on 3rd November 1988, on the eve of the opening of Andrew's debut Cork Street show. Robilliard's reputation has soared since his passing, whilst Andrew's has receded into the shadows. Years ago, a gallerist turned down a proposal for an exhibition by Andrew on account of the work making them feel sad. A sure example of getting the point and missing it at the same time. Much of his output transpired under the threat of AIDS in the eighties, and as his days darkened, so too did the tone of his creations. An artist who would have embraced the digital age, Heard also missed out on "Cool Britannia" and the Sacchi effect, and though a successful name, his career was in freefall by the time of his death. His main gallery had gone bus,t and a raft of his paintings were lost in that quagmire of legalities. Also, Andrew Heard was becoming ill. I last saw him at the David Robilliard show at the Royal Festival Hall in November 1992, and he looked frail and distracted. I arranged to visit him in the New Year, but opening the Independent newspaper on a Manchester bus that January, his obituary leapt out at me and my first thought was 'Why didn't you tell me you'd died?' the instant ridiculousness of loss in that sealed thought and moment.

One afternoon, we were sitting in Garden Walk listening to an old Max Miller comedy routine on LP about two 'sensitive boys'. Miller also features in one of Heard's paintings. He turned to me and smiled in embarrassment of disclosure, "You know I cannot do this with anyone else." I knew exactly what he meant. Perhaps it was due to the fact that only three months separated us in age, but we had a shorthand symbiosis about aspects of culture and the meaning of otherwise meaningless things. For years, we exchanged records and ephemera. I once found an old roll of color movie film of sights of London from the sixties. It immediately went in an envelope to Garden Walk, and Andrew was delighted to have it. Perhaps we simply longed for and remembered colors, images, and sounds that we almost missed out on experiencing—the near seed of impossible nostalgia.

Andrew once informed me that his notoriety had considerably increased with the workmen on the site near his studio with the arrival of the effete figure of the artist, designer, and Barbie enthusiast BillyBoy. Having been decanted from a London cab in all his gazelle-like finery, he was greeted by a chorus of catcalls and whistles until Andrew answered the door. The visit took an unfortunate turn when Catherine Brown, Andrew's painting assistant, accidentally spilled a cup of tea on their precious guest. The following week, a package arrived from Andrew with a copy of BillyBoy's Barbie biography enclosed. a thrifty, not terribly appropriate, piece of re-gifting that I still possess on account of its history.

There should be a book about Andrew Heard and David Robilliard's brief but productive tenure in the East End, when only artists could afford to live there, before it became prime real estate for developers. A lost world that was frustratingly brief, but infinitely vital and fascinating. Both were very different emissaries of their craft, but strangely complementary. Robilliard, didactic and spontaneous, Heard, reflective and mannered. Their mantles have been appropriated by successive, lesser talents. Theirs, a creativity stymied, removed, and marginalized by AIDS. Writing this has stirred memories afresh and a sense of former sadnesses.

I include this poem as part of that looming tragedy and as a piece of unwanted legacy. It annotates moments at the 1991 launch at Waterman's Art Gallery for The Cat's Pyjamas, the book of poems by David Robilliard that Andrew, Catherine Hollens nee Brown, and I had edited, the first to appear since his death.

---------------------------------------------------------

A PRIVATE VIEW for Andrew Heard 1958-1993

It was a day like yesterday

We left the crowd behind,

a day of rare sun and clean breezes

on the balcony above the river,

And I recall the rise below of children's voices.

It seemed private.

I'd sensed small clues,

odd details in mail,

our voices within wire,

and you were suddenly thinner.

Skirting the subject,

blaming overwrought concern,

I mentioned a friend's mother

had almost died of pneumonia,

but you said blankly

'Mine is a very special kind.'

The bomb and the penny fell.

I just hugged you.

Loss of hope at times stalls the urge to cry

and in the face of your brave one,

mine said nothing.

You said things I'd read

'Not accepting it as terminal.

Fighting this.'

Desperate, I conjured with

names of long survivors,

but you cut through

'At what cost, though?'

From all the words in my world of them

I could muster none,

my mind reeling at such savage progress.

Distant from the crowd,

these fragments of exchange,

felt personal, unseen,

but some months since your funeral,

a friend met there

recalled our exit from the gallery.

His asking who I was?

Her informative reply.

They watched us in the distance

like some silent film

and as I hugged you

she turned to simply say

'I think he's told him.'

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Meditative Traces of the Neches River

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:33:51 +0000

Meditative Traces of the Neches River Thalia Vrachopoulos May 26, 2026 - 12:33

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EG-1, 2026, color woodcut, 114" x 270"

Bill Pangburn’s exhibition, Printed Traces: A Neches River Journal, at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET), because of the subject’s personal significance to the artist, should first be discussed in terms of its symbolism. Rivers, since antiquity, have occupied a central position in the philosophical, religious, and metaphysical imagination of humanity, serving as enduring symbols of flux, temporality, memory, purification, and transcendence. In Heraclitus's fragments, the river becomes the ultimate expression of perpetual becoming, encapsulating the idea that existence is defined by constant transformation and instability. Classical philosophy and mythology have further developed this symbolic dimension of the river whose waters represented forgetfulness, oblivion, and the soul’s journey between worlds. Within the Abrahamic traditions, the Jordan River acquired spiritual significance as a site of revelation, purification, and rebirth, especially through baptism.

For Pangburn, the Neches River transcends its immediate geographical and industrial identity within Orange County, in Southeast Texas. Pangburn’s Neches River abstract woodcut prints are animated by shifting textures, layered surfaces, and fluid spatial rhythms, reminding us of various minuscule biomorphic and microscopic organisms. They evoke perpetual movement and light not merely as natural phenomena, but as manifestations of temporality and evanescence. Much like the rivers of ancient philosophical and religious traditions, the Neches River in Pangburn’s work functions as a liminal space suspended between material presence and immaterial transcendence, reactivating the archetypal symbolism of the river within a contemporary artistic vocabulary, transforming the landscape of Southeast Texas into a site of mystical reflection on the passage of time, the fragility of perception, and the continuous movement between the visible and the unseen.

In that sense, Pangburn’s dense black-and-white works of interwoven lines possess a visceral immediacy akin to the visionary writings of António Vieira, particularly insofar as both articulate encounters with the otherworldly through sustained engagement with the motif of the river. In Vieira’s case, his traversal of the Amazon River by canoe in the 17^th century becomes not merely a geographical journey but a spiritual passage, wherein the immense and fluid expanse of the river functions as a catalyst for arcane reflection. The Amazon, in Vieira’s writings, is rendered as an unstable yet generative flux in which material reality and the uncreated energy of God converge, producing a mode of thought shaped by immersion, drift, and revelation. Pangburn described in an interview the formative experience of being in a boat at the center of the river, recalling how his attention shifted toward the reflections and shadows cast across the water’s surface. Much like Vieira’s account of drifting through the Amazon as a site of spiritual and perceptual transformation, Pangburn’s woodcuts channel the unstable rhythms of water, reflection, and movement into densely layered compositions that evoke both ecological complexity and visionary experience.

In a parallel but formally distinct manner, Pangburn’s practice translates this experiential logic into a visual and procedural language of drawing and printmaking, while also emerging from a sustained research interest in natural environments, biotopes, and riverine ecologies rooted in his identity as a native Texan. His aerial woodcuts evoke the dense landscapes of the Neches in the process of desiccation, where waterways appear fragmented into winding curves, exposed channels, hills, and eddies, suggesting the visible traces of ecological depletion. This sensibility is deeply connected to Pangburn’s concern with contemporary environmental crises, particularly the destruction of ecosystems and the increasing scarcity of accessible water sources affecting vulnerable and geographically isolated communities around the world.

In contrast, Margaret Scott Dobbins’ concurrent show Environments Imagined, also housed at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, approaches landscape through an explicitly generative and improvisational mindset, allowing environments to emerge from imagination, associative memory, and the open-ended prompt of "what if," resulting in forms of dreamy aquarelles and vibrant colors that drift toward non-objective topographies. While both Texans, the artists depict the natural environment as a space of becoming rather than of static representation. Pangburn’s work remains more compelling in its refusal to surrender fully to romantic reverie or utopian abstraction. Even as the river operates as a crossing into the transcendent, it is continually anchored to ecological reality and the material consequences of environmental disruption. This tension prevents Pangburn’s imagery from dissolving into purely imaginative landscape-making, instead sustaining a critical awareness of ecological loss and instability that grounds the visual experience in contemporary environmental urgency.

left to right BT 3, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17" BT 2, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17" BT 1, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17"

Yet Pangburn’s intricate, Daedalian configurations of infinite monochromatic linework (composed as endless mazes, labyrinthine structures, and recursive curves) operate as meditative constructions through which temporal and perceptual boundaries are suspended. Rather than describing the river through textual narration like Veira or imaginal fancy like Dobbins, Pangburn enacts a comparable condition of flow through the disciplined repetition of line, whereby the act of making becomes an embodied form of contemplation. From a distant vantage point, some of the compositions may evoke an affinity with the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism, recalling in particular the all-over fields of mark-making associated with Jackson Pollock. Yet such an initial reading is quickly unsettled upon closer inspection. As the viewer approaches, the surface resolves into an extraordinary system of interlacing forms: sinuous, river-like trajectories of black ink that interweave with finely articulated white interruptions, producing a dense, calligraphic topology of flow and counterflow.

Ultimately, Bill Pangburn’s Printed Traces: A Neches River Journal, presented at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET), culminates in a visual language where his monochrome lines do not merely represent riverine systems but generate a perceptual environment in which the viewer is drawn into a continuous oscillation of flow, recursion, and spatial drift. In this sense, Pangburn’s practice subtly displaces the logic of the Situationist aerial cartographies and dérive, which sought to map psycho-geographical movement from an external or elevated perspective. Instead of surveying space from above, his works internalize movement, collapsing distance into an embodied experience of passage. The trajectory of the river is no longer diagrammed as an external network but approaches the contemplative intensity of calligraphic traditions in Islamic art and Zen Buddhist practice, where the gesture of inscription is inseparable from breath, attention, and inner stillness. The line becomes both a printed trace and an experienced event so that the viewer is not positioned outside the work but is gradually absorbed into its rhythmic continuity of ever-changing forms.

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Through the Eye, Not with It

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:06:29 +0000

Through the Eye, Not with It Thalia Vrachopoulos May 12, 2026 - 19:06

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abstract expressionism

A Figure of the Soul, 2025, 122x122 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

Gong Byung: Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence

Exhibition Tenri Cultural Institute, New York City

April 13^th- 25^th, 2026

As the season nears the threshold of summer, the Manhattan art world undergoes a palpable transformation, mirrored in the city's shifting meteorology. There is a particular resonance this Spring in the way the atmosphere softens, as the Atlantic wind loses its wintry bite and grows progressively warmer. This sense of a hyper cosmic bridge between the primordial and the contemporary is nowhere more evident than in the city’s galleries.

Anastasiya Tarasenko’s solo, Primordial Soup, at Anna Zorina Gallery, emerges as a profound anchor for such a pre- and post-historical mediation. While the title ostensibly references Alexander Oparin’s hypothesis regarding the elemental biogenesis of the planet, Tarasenko transcends the purely biological to offer a spiritualized rendering of this evolutionary sludge. Her Old Master-like canvases deconstruct and challenge evolutionary theory, saturating it with a visceral Boschian grotesque that exposes the raw instincts of human consumption. Amid this material instability, the work channels the sublime mysticism of artists such as Mikalojus Ciurlionis, who was known for translating musical spirituality into turbulent seascapes.

An even more compelling bridge is found in the abstract work of Korean artist Gong Byung with his debut solo exhibition, Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence, curated by Paris Suechung Koh at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Gong’s series is paired with the sophisticated precision of Koh’s curation, where the strategic placement of each piece allows the ambient light to activate the artist's intricate carvings. Gong’s series offers a unique visual synthesis of non-objective abstraction with the Zen metaphysics of emptiness or Sunyata. The thirteenth-century Japanese Zen monk, Dogen, in his celebrated writings, does not conceive of emptiness as a nihilistic void or mere absence of being, but rather as the dynamic interdependence and impermanence of all phenomena. Herein, emptiness and fullness cease to exist as opposites, and reality is understood as an unbroken process of becoming; a generative matrix of boundless potentiality. By systematically carving into the transparent substrate, Gong creates a sculptural idiom where the act of removal becomes the very genesis of form. This density of emptiness mirrors Dogen’s rejection of dualism, effectively collapsing the distinction between the void and the manifest. Simultaneously, light refracts through the engraved trajectories of Gong’s chisel, manifesting a light of presence that captures the fleeting and luminous nature of existence, elevating the industrial to the spiritual and providing a profound encounter with the essential non-duality of being and non-being.

The Eyes of the Soul, 2023, 97x97x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

At first glance, Gong’s circular works A Figure of the Soul and The Eyes of the Soul resemble an immense eye suspended in darkness. The work’s hollow center recalls a pupil as both a physical aperture and a spiritual emptiness. Yet this void is not an absence in the negative sense. Rather, it evokes a condition akin to śūnyatā, empty of fixed substance, yet immeasurably full of cosmic vastness. The radiating lines extending from the center create the impression of an industrialized periphery, simultaneously mechanical and organic, as though the works exist between celestial cartography and engineered precision. The golden surface of The Eyes of the Soul resembles a monumental cymbal caught in perpetual vibration. At the same time, the silver-white expanses of A Figure of the Soul suggest a biomorphic galaxy in continuous expansion, within the infinite flux of the universe. This sensibility resonates profoundly with the artist’s own statement that “time is flow, and living is flow,” and that the layered traces of carving, scratching, pressing, and pouring become material manifestations of existence itself. The transparent acrylic surface, which according to Gong “reveals everything, even the smallest dust and the innermost layers,” functions not merely as material but as a philosophical membrane through which the artist seeks to render “more beautiful and pure forms of the soul, as well as unknown worlds.”

Emotional Loneliness, 2025, 204x122x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

In his monumental work Emotional Loneliness, Gong abandons the centripetal cosmology of the earlier round compositions in favor of an immense horizontal field that unfolds like a haunted threshold between matter and disappearance. The work evokes the spectral atmosphere of an analog transmission slowly dissolving into static; its dense accumulation of vertical incisions resembles both frozen rainfall and electronic interference hovering in vacant nullity. In this sense, the piece possesses a haunting quality: it appears as though the image was caught between memory and erasure, between the persistence of presence and the inevitability of entropy. The lower register, with its fractured crystalline textures and sediment-like accumulations, recalls the abstracted ice landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, yet stripped of Romantic figuration and translated into a post-human vocabulary of material vibration. Vast, empty, and glacially silent, the composition confronts the viewer with a sublime expanse that resists narrative anchoring, producing instead a meditative confrontation with immeasurable distance and existential isolation.

At the same time, the work extends the transcendental ambitions of Mark Rothko into a radically different metaphysical terrain. Whereas Rothko’s chromatic fields sought spiritual immersion through color and atmosphere, Gong’s Emotional Loneliness approaches sublimity through the ontology of emptiness itself, an abyssal field in which form continually dissolves into nothingness. The acrylic panel, transparent yet resistant, records countless acts of carving, scratching, and accumulation until the surface itself appears fossilized by duration. What emerges is an image that feels simultaneously geological and digital, ancient and post-industrial; a frozen psychic landscape in which silence acquires material density, and where the soul, stripped of all symbolic ornament, confronts the infinite coldness and beauty of emptiness itself.

My Inner Self, 2025, 245x122x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

Similarly, Gong’s My Inner Self, with its dense violet-electric hues recalling the crystalline luminosity of Mikhail Vrubel, intensifies the charged energy of the inner landscape. In this striking composition, Gong moves beyond the earlier themes of silence and loneliness, transforming the canvas into an ethereal field of chromatic vibration alive with metaphysical force. The work evokes, with even greater philosophical tension, Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas of emptiness as a generative and dynamic state of being. At the same time, its luminous interiority suggests certain Vedāntic notions of consciousness, without fully equating emptiness with Ātman. Here, Gong creates a deep panorama of indigo and pulsating magenta that seems to flicker with its own inner light. This chromatic intensity suggests that the emptiness of the self is not a static void, but a charged space of latent spiritual energy. The inner self thus appears as a vast, non-objective expanse in which the carved acrylic substrate serves as a conduit for shimmering otherworldly force.

Relationship, 2024, 152.5x101x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Pai

Gong Byung’s work urges us to depart from mere optical observation toward a more radical mode of perception. As the Atlantic winds carry the promise of summer, his canvases remind us that we must learn to see through the eye, not with it. To see with the eye is to be trapped by the industrial rigidity of the material and the surface-level finish of the acrylic; to see through it is to engage the inner vision of emptiness as a lens of enlightenment. Gong’s masterfully carved substrates act as this very threshold, where the transparency of the medium ceases to be a physical barrier and becomes a conduit for the sublime. Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence forces the viewer into a state of seeing through the physical towards the hyperphysical. Ultimately, the "Density of Emptiness" is revealed not as a void to be feared, but as the primary site of a "Light of Presence," an internal landscape where the soul, unburdened by the dualism of being and non-being, finally recognizes its own luminous continuity within the infinite flow of the universe.

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A Minimal Look

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:12:28 +0000

A Minimal Look Robert Cochrane April 27, 2026 - 09:12

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Candy Darling

Every artist carries within them an idea of how they'd like to be best remembered, the impact they'd like to leave on a small or wider world. That world has a mind of its own, though, and gifts legacy in an arbitrary fashion, if it gifts any at all. Such has been the trajectory of the New York photographer Laura Rubin; her huge volume of work, from fashion shoots to derelict windows, is like snippets from a dream. Ghostly, elusive, and somewhat unsettling, her tremendously atmospheric images haunt and stimulate, be they architectural subjects, street scenes in grainy intimacy, or the capture of a briefly glimpsed face. They have an abundance of beauty and grace, but with an edginess to their charm that makes them seem much older than they actually are. To those in the know, Laura Rubin is the photographer of the Warhol Circle, a title she never sought, never cultivated, nor much cares for, but like a wonky default setting, it is the regular garland that she is bestowed, a glittering momento mori, for all her subjects, cracked actors, drag queens, the dispossessed, are largely dead—her photographs, their afterlife gifted by the click of her probingly sympathetic lens.

New York-born Laura Rubin first became aware of Andy Warhol in 1964 through an article in Show magazine featuring his monochromatic photographs. A curious and curiouser girl, she was suitably beguiled by his transient apparitional aspects, and his acolytes, little rich girl in a tailspin Edie Sedgwick and the downwardly mobile socialite Baby Jane Holzer. A wish to meet the silver-wigged wonder formulated. Before that, she had been acquainted with personages like the poet Gerard Malanga, whom she met at a folk dancing class in Greenwich Village in 1962, and Ronnie Cutrone, who was an artist in his own right. Both were Warhol's studio assistants. Certain things are likely, and there was an inevitability to her encountering the pied piper of Pop Art and his colorful entourage; circles within circles overlap, merge, and eventually open outwards. In the larger small world that passed for artistic alternative, nobody was very far away in sixties Manhattan.

Rubin recalls, "I liked fashion magazines then and wanted to become a stylist for them. While taking an advertising course at the School of Visual Arts, I was required to study photography. I'd bought a copy of Video magazine, and there was a photo of Andy holding a Bolex camera. He was wearing a striped t-shirt, which was the style for some in those days. Soon after, I saw him in the flesh in Figaro's Cafe in the Village. There was a disco on the lower level on Sunday afternoons. After that, Andy began to appear everywhere. He was suddenly in demand. As the saying goes, 'Andy would turn up for the opening of an envelope.' I was hoping to be in one of his movies, but nothing happened." It seems likely that Laura was just a little too together to be included in and absorbed by Warhol's cavalcade.

Candy Arms Up

On account of her art and her craft, Laura Rubin has largely been an unwitting architect in her own reluctant byline. At a time when drag queens weren't considered appropriate subjects for inclusion in photographs, she immortalized them by rendering these moments elegant, beautiful, and real. The portraits she made have a legendary pull of old Hollywood publicity shoots, steeped in atmosphere, mystery, and rare beauty. It's no surprise that she admits to having a fascination for the intimate starkness of Victorian portrait photography. She made her down-at-heel-in-heels iconic, but never freaky. Over time, this aspect of innovation has been shunted to the margins by successive generations. Still, her take on Warhol icon and Lou Reed muse, Candy Darling, is transcendent, whilst her stark portraits of Holly Woodlawn are reminiscent of Joan Crawford in the 1940s, so vampishly stylish that she seems like a creature from another age. They are beyond drag. The term pioneer springs to mind. And as the sixties and seventies become historic eras entombed in amber, Rubin should be celebrated for being a true, if unintentional, mistress of innovation. In truth, she presented her alternative subjects as how they in part saw themselves, people of beauty who sought but generally didn't receive respect, and usually the wrong kind of recognition.

Laura Rubin didn't set out to be lionized as a photographer of Drag Queens. They populated the fringes and shadows of her Manhattan world, and, as a young, attractive woman with a camera, she was drawn to them like moths to a flame in hopes of immortality. It was their style, flashes and dashes of color and personality that drew her lens to them. She ran into Holly Woodlawn at Max's (a.k.a. Haraldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Dankaki, 1946-2015), a crazy Puerto Rican with a penchant for dramatic poses. On seeing her photos, this resident of the back room at Max's Kansas City wished to be a subject. Rubin's rendering of her is both tragic, dynamic, and sublime. Holly had a way with words, or perhaps they had a way with her, as she proclaimed the end results of their session 'superfalous'—her mash-up of superlative and fabulous. At the time of their shooting, Holly was making the film Trash with Paul Morrissey, hence the ethos of vintage Hollywood so perfectly captured by Rubin.

Holly Broken Goddess

Candy Darling (1944-1974) was also a regular at Max's. Originally from Long Island, she was well on the way to establishing herself as a counterculture icon. Rubin's iconic shots were taken by accident since Candy's friend, Jeremiah Newton, was supposed to be Laura's original subject. Newton had simply asked if he could bring Candy along. He is to be thanked for posterity, as she hardly surprisingly edged into the frames. The photographs furnished Candy, who began life as James Lawrence Slattery, with a Kim Novak-esque tenderness and grace. Candy died in 1974 from cancer, the result of taking illegal hormone shots to assist her in her transformation into womanhood. Rubin's images have helped to galvanize and enhance her legacy as a great beauty, trans or otherwise. She inspired Lou Reed to compose "Candy Says" in his days with the Velvet Underground. He also immortalized her in the ever-popular "Walk On The Wild Side." She appeared in Klute with Jane Fonda and campaigned unsuccessfully for a part in the Mae West vehicle of Gore Vidal's outlandish Myra Beckenbridge. Only twenty-nine when she died, Candy was buried in her favorite dress, and the legendary Gloria Swanson arrived to pay her respects with a gracious wave.

Maria Montez (a.k.a. Rene Rivera, 1935-2016) was a further subject in drag, also Puerto Rican. Montez was a star of underground film, most notably Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, before evolving to early "Superstar" status in a handful of Warhol movies. It was Rubin's idea to ask him to pose after seeing him perform in a John Vocarro off-off-Broadway play in 1969. Unlike Candy and Holly, Montez never became a regular part of Andy's Factory entourage. There is a real intimacy to Laura's shots of him transforming via the application of lavish make-up and clothes; the exposure within an exposure. Nowadays, Rubin reflects that, "I later did color work of the drag shows, not because I was bothered about drag—there was no agenda in that way—but everything was visual, and they were nice. entertaining people."

Mario Close Up

That aspect of Rubin's vast catalog of work bears only the briefest fingerprint of her true vision, its scope, and its artfulness. Her monochrome shots of her native New York are a strange harlequin confetti of fleeting shards. Images grasped in the blink of a shutter, the impulse to preserve the fleetingness of a thought. They use the transposition of billboards against a building or skyline in a way that makes the eye question what it first thought it had seen. There are strange amalgams of things caught in doorways and shop windows, and the profound starkness of light, the random grace of a passer-by captured and preserved, the sadness inherent but unknown etched across a stranger's face. Yet, as of yet, there is no proper solo publication of this talented artist's work available, nothing for the uninitiated hungry eye to study and peruse. A tremendous oversight, yet a treasure trove for any diligent photography publisher or gallery. There is a single video montage with an appropriately chosen jazz soundtrack that serves as a perfect online entry point. Still, it affords only cursory attention to a talent that has been both celebrated and obscured by its association with the Warhol mythology.

Rubin remains sanguine about the presumptions and secondhand limelight her Warhol threads bring.

Andrea and Geraldine Smith

"Although I found Andy okay as a person, I didn't find him that earth-shaking to dissect. My mistake was not to bring my camera when taken to the Union Square Factory, but my attraction was more '60s socialites, their merging with edgy art chic. My connection with Warhol has perplexing and amusing overtones. One editor came over to my apartment and remarked, 'Oh my God! I thought you would have dark velvet drapes and black-painted walls!' The surprise was my oak flooring and rattan furniture. A minimal look, but to get that from a smart New Yorker! Or people think I'm a junkie!"

Now in her seventies, she has not had all that kind of life. She lost many friends to the AIDS crisis, and like many artists before her, has no health insurance or savings. She does, however, have medical bills from a litany of age-related illnesses. Her friend, the performance artist Penny Arcade, has set up a GoFundMe page (see below) to assist her. Prints of her legendary images are available for purchase. It is a worthy act for a worthy and worthwhile woman whose talents, despite many exhibitions, shows, and mentions, have not secured her in the present or the future.

-------------------------------------------------------

Laura Rubin

PLEASE DONATE TODAY!

Dear friends, 2026 has begun, and I send you all my best wishes. As most of you know for 8 years you have helped me keep a roof over the head of elderly photographer Laura Rubin who lives a very marginal existence without Social Security, Income or savings abandoned by her family suffering from Lupus and other autoimune illnesses That we have been able to keep her fed and with a roof over her head, we a group of strangers, attests to the power of our humanity. Laura lives month to month in fear and anxiety, with much physical pain from bone loss. And without your donations, she would have died from sepsis or been evicted from her apartment. Her immune system is non-functioning due to Lupus. We need to get her January rent paid—she has made an excuse to her landlord, but she is in a critical situation right now. ANY AMOUNT HELPS! There is little reserve in her bank account. She will need an IV to kill the current infection; her white blood cells are 3 times higher than normal. For donations of $225 USA, $275 international (includes FEDX), we have photos of ANDY WARHOL SUPERSTARS: Mario Montez, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Francis Francine, Geraldine Smith, Andrea Feldman, and Penny Arcade.

These are museum-quality, printed on double-weight archival paper. For photo selection, click on Google Drive.

Choose photos here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/10VsRVaWA8Srl_KHjgLq8kriMHQUjyyE1.

Please share with your Facebook friends. Laura is deeply grateful for your support. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-laura-survive

Thank you. Penny Arcade

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LAURA RUBIN PHOTOGRAPHER

WHAT AN AMAZING ARTICAL. SMALL CORRECTION: BABY JANE HOLZER LEFT ANDYS FACTORY WHEN IT BECOME A FREAK SHOW. THIS WAS SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE ANDY WAS SHOT. WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME "HOW DID YOU MEET SUPERSTARS"?? I REPOND: "THE QUESTION SHOULD BE "HOW DID THEY MEET MEE"???? MANY WERE FROM BROOKLYN, WE GREW UP TOGETHER.

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Exhausted by the Burdens of Life

Dom Lombardi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:05:18 +0000

Exhausted by the Burdens of Life Dom Lombardi March 15, 2026 - 22:05

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Alexey von Schlippe: Expressions of Mind and Soul
Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT

Alexey von Schlippe (1915-1988) left his title as a Russian Baron in the court of Tsar Nicholas II behind when he became a citizen of the United States in 1960. What emerged in his art during and after this transition was a unique sort of social realism, not unlike the immediacy and empathy in the egg tempera paintings of Ben Shahn, but with more intimacy and isolation.

Still Life with Mushrooms (1974), oil on board, 3 ½ x 7 ½ inches, all images courtesy of the author

As part of the introduction to the exhibit, a descriptive wall panel mentions Von Schlippe's inspiration from Giotto and Piero della Francesca, which is evident in his dry-brush technique, common in the ancient art of egg tempera, an approach Von Schlippe maintains even when he paints in oils. The text also mentions the influence of West African art, which appears in various ways, including subject matter featuring a black woman with an exposed upper body, à la mid-century National Geographic magazine; abrupt perspective in the stylized masks and adornments; and anatomical simplification of the same. Beyond these influences, the content of Von Schlippe's paintings reveals many psychological traits. Additionally, like Andrew Wyeth, who also masterfully worked with egg tempera, capturing the distinctive souls of his subjects he knew well, Von Schlippe's way with egg tempera finds a less individual representation of a specific soul. Von Schlippe takes a more universal approach to the harm inflicted on an oppressed group that longs to be treated with the respect they deserve in an age of drastic social change.

Reclining Figure with White Blouse (undated, mid-20th century), egg tempera with oil on masonite, 24 ¼ x 48 inches

The paintings in this exhibition were created between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, when America experienced significant social unrest and change. A fact that you can feel emanating from his female subjects in particular, who are often people of color, seemingly exhausted by the burdens that come with living through troubled times. In Reclining Figure with White Blouse (undated, mid twentieth century), you get a sense of temporary peace as a compositional chrysalis forms around the figure. In this dream state, the harshness of the outside world is quietly absorbed in waves of harmless cleansing transitions within that subtle enclosure. And despite the metaphorical cushioning, there remains tension in the bent arms and fisted hands as they respond to indelible memories of repressive circumstances.

Exhibited directly below Reclining Figure with White Blouse is Reclining Figure (1980), which depicts a middle-aged woman who still wears her simple black shoes—a detail that does not appear in any of the other paintings, all of which feature barefoot subjects. Reclining Figure also has greater clarity, with more realistic facial features, sharp pleats in a long skirt, a formal couch, and hands set in a classic sleep-like, prayer-like pose, giving this particular person a feeling of security and personal importance. Perhaps it’s someone who is related to the artist.

Reclining Figure (1980), egg tempera with oil on canvas, 24 x 48 inches

Conversely, the figure in Reclining Nude (Half Nude, Hands Raised) (1958) offers great import due to its overtly spiritual component and attention to detail in the sinuous, interconnected folds of fabric. The uplifted arms also add power and presence to the figure that none of the other paintings share. In the subject’s face, the relatively blank eyes convey a mask-like presence that brings us back to Von Schlippe’s interest in West African sculpture in all of its ritualistic and ceremonial forms.

Seascape (1978), oil on masonite, 20 x 24 inches

Seascape (1978), painted solely in oil, ventures the furthest into the Surrealist realm. The composition has a sort of rocking motion, as if we are viewing the scene from a boat in choppy seas, while the looming sandy cliffs and the flood of ocean water that shimmers on the distant horizon strain to attain their individual heights in the picture plane. Then you have the Houston-to-Boston-leaning clouds that create a clockwise rotation in the composition, giving the scene a sense of endless movement. Ignoring all this upheaval is a seagull perched atop a small branch of a large piece of driftwood on the lower left of the painting. Facing outward and away from the center, the bird casts doubt on the narrative's truth, telling the viewer that all this commotion is imagined, pieced together from bits of memory and preconceptions.

Two Bottles (1958), oil on board, 14 ⅔ x 11 ¼ inches

As a still life painter, Von Schlippe is equally skilled. Still Life with Mushroom (1974) has that George Grosz, Otto Dix brand of intensity, while Two Bottles (1958) leans a bit more toward the softened and shimmering—closer to Giorgio Morandi, only with lots of detail in the reflective surfaces. All in all, a striking exhibition in one of the most distinctive and magnificent buildings in New England that is best known for its extensive collection of world-class plaster casts, such as Michelangelo’s Pietà and Moses, Donatello’s David, and Baccio Bandinelli's Laocoön and His Sons. A destination that is well worth a visit any time you are in Norwich, Connecticut.

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Roaming Imagination

Millree Hughes — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:54:51 +0000

Roaming Imagination Millree Hughes March 1, 2026 - 11:54

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Mike Cockrill: Falling in Place
Mosaic Artspace, 19-28 31st Place (Andromeda Building)
Long Island City, NY 11101
Thru March 20th

I became a curious fan of Mike Cockrill's paintings and drawings on Facebook, beginning in 2022, when the artist returned from a Covid-imposed isolation to meet in public. I approached him at a Mark Kostabi show on West Broadway. He's tall and confident, easy to pick out in a crowd. One of the reasons I was attracted to his FB art profile is his graphic versatility, drawing skills, and sharp imagination. Artists such as Daumier and Goya, and editorial cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, created nightmare fantasies and ironic jokes with their pens.

His technical facility is deceptively mainstream, serving a subversive bend. "I had an early fascination with popular forms like magazine illustration and political cartoons." As a young artist, he took a job designing business forms in the financial district for Merrill Lynch, getting an inside view of cubicle life.

By the time we became acquainted, I had morphed into a veteran of the outdoor billboard-painting scene. In the blue-collar circus of ropes and ladders, the painter of big signs was called the "mechanic." Apart from a chuckle about the sinister Charles Bronson movie by that title, I identified with the cold impersonality of the content (cars, bottles, fax machines). The old-school bosses and shop managers put complete trust in my hands. I often dreamed about a clean job at a Madison Avenue desk.

1> Office Drones

In The Idea Room, a distressed gray office like a prison cell, three co-workers are pitching a campaign proposal. They are dressed in sparse Mormon black pants and shoes, white shirts, and ties. The result of their labors is demonstrably futile, the floor littered with paper airplanes and crumpled pages. An executive sucks on the lifeline of a cigarette while another sketches an invisible idea on a floating easel, yet a third lies supine in the exhausted pose of a patient in a psychiatric session. The figures are rendered as ciphers, thin suggestions with clown noses. A clockface stares like a merciless moon.

The Idea Room

2> Maps and Neighborhoods

Mike is from Virginia, a bedroom community close to the nation's government offices. In other paintings, he shows off his gift for storytelling in sunny, halcyon landscapes. The types of children and activities in those are deceptively innocent and attractive. Mike's plots add a sinister twist. In earlier works of lawn parties, sweet girls in pastel pinafores hold pistols aimed at cowering clowns.

His views of suburban houses are devotional and can resemble pre-Renaissance Italian art. The ranch-style houses are composed with a model-maker's care and patience, often using multiple perspectives, or more pastorally, seen from a bird's-eye view. In these, we see a sharp-edged Japanese space, the curved roads gracefully disobey logical connections. The surface is layered and scraped to reveal hidden layers, with drips and veils, seams of patchwork, affirming the flat canvas. Nowhere do we see the anecdote of dogs, figures walking, and cars on errands. An eerie quiet prevails, as if the families have all departed for offices and schools–perhaps a reminder of the Cold War.

Maps and Neighborhoods

The grinning malevolent map of the USA is another of Cockrill's inventions. The omnivorous face of a US map grasps with tentacles and mechanical arms, a reminder of MAGA's threats of rogue imperialism, the face of America: arms dealer to the world. Heads roll, and bloody conquests from history are revived: the map is an ogre–the tenuous Union affirmed by Lincoln at the surrender of Lee's army still festers, remains a squirming, itching bed-case. Anger against scapegoated minorities is normalized.

The Skull Gatherer

3> Falling in Place: Watteau and Fragonard

One wonders whether, by drawing on Watteau and Fragonard, Mike gives free rein to beauty and refinement without contemporary content. Or maybe the bubble-dwelling courtiers of the Rococo era mimic the climate deniers or the isolationists of today's head-in-the-sand retreat from stable alliances? The Rococo world, highly decorated and refined, is now the poster child of a blind and willful negligence of the social order. A student of history knows what followed the last Bourbon monarchy: The French Revolution. Who can say, as some historians claim, that the violence of the 1790s was seismic, causing a chain reaction of mass death, into the Russian Revolution and the two World Wars? The expedient of the guillotine is expressed in Mike's related drawings of decapitated heads.

PUDDLE OF REGRETS

These concerns seem secondary to his fun in picture making, teasing delicate gestures of storybook women and girls from homely scraps and playful accidents on the canvas. The clash of materials and subject is charming as it is contradictory. His attachment of layers and shifting of the focal length on the players in this farcical, self-conscious space vibrates like an earthquake.

Blindfold Falling

4> Parents

There is a similar cancellation or discretion in this canvas. A traditional painter would be locked into the tedious posing of the couple in tiring positions, the result usually forced into its own stiff reality. Mike suggests a dreamlike flash as the principals assume the pose–a memoir deliberately faded, a fashionable red blazer worn by dad, a stylish car coat and handbag for mom. The likeness is an homage, emerging from the mystique of unity.

Parents

In modern culture, the painter is an uneasy hero, constantly striving towards a more complete reality. Bonnard said: "...the artist is grounded in the palette, but when the illusion appears, that's when the nonsense begins." Degas worked on Young Spartans Exercising for ten years. Hopper spoke of "a deepening affection" in his slow process, coaxing finality out of only two paintings a year. They were fiercely committed and took painting as far as their talent would allow. Revision for Cockrill is a source of life.

5> Destruction and Reconstruction

Perhaps living in our challenging, densely opinionated society requires nimble reassessments and constant reactions to the latest shocks. Who is not aware of some imbalance and insecurity? For artists, self-awareness is a top concern, as a daunting field of competitors claim and fight for their own style message. His painting, Fighter Jet No. 3, channels amoral, jarring realism—a pathos like stepping near a bird flattened by car tires. The layering of accurately cut textile shapes conveys a grim, inhuman force.

Fighter Jet No. 3

There was a saying from the abstract painters of the 1950s: "...you paint it out, and it is still there." What was the "it?" Could the artist see the ghost of his failed attempt through the veils of overlaid paint and start over on a new tack?

I think of the myopic trance of Melville's anti-hero, Captain Ahab, searching oceans for the white whale. Mike Cockrill's process of scavenging layers of textile, building images with ready-made colors from the thrift store racks, feeds and satisfies this anxiety. It comes of an impatience with fixed goals and of his roaming imagination. His work is from a tradition in which talented admirers of past masters allow themselves gauche manners and not-so-subtle jokes. Painters hope to surprise themselves, and maybe get some laughs.

John S. Paul, Brooklyn 2026

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Thank you for the review

What a pleasure to read John Pauls insights and reflections on my current exhibition of collage paintings. Thank you JP, Millree Hughes and Culture Catch.

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PSYCHOPOMPS

Millree Hughes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:12:52 +0000

PSYCHOPOMPS Millree Hughes February 23, 2026 - 20:12

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Josh Smith: Destiny
David Swirmer Gallery, 519 West 19th Street, New York
January 21 - February 28, 2026

I believe that I can use a combination of mental looseness and an almost meditative concentration to access Consciousness. The same place that the artist goes to make the art.

Giacomo D'Ariano and Frederico Faggin's new theory of Consciousness* claims that it is not linked to the functioning of the body and can persist even after death. That it is somewhere else, in another dimension. The body behaves like a drone controlled by this source.

Josh Smith's new show at Zwirner is of paintings of Grim Reapers on bikes on New York streets.

I believe they are painted from AI-generated images. AI really doesn't understand how bikes work at all, any more than it understands how arms connect to the body under that shroud. The hands become wheels, and some join the body to the bike. AI is looking for patterns on the plane at the front of the image, mainly because it has difficulty with the Z-axis. Consequently, wheels order themselves decoratively; lines of handlebars or cross braces link with bike chains in gestural strokes.

AI is perfectly situated to communicate with another dimension.+ It has become like a global unconscious. A dream state that is in danger of becoming a mass hallucination.

Before that happens, perhaps it can reveal pure states of being.

What other ways can I use to access the creative infinite? I have read that drugs can help, but which ones? The shimmer of ketamine? The feel-good confidence of MDMA? There are Halloween colours here that could've come from a 'shroom schema. Purple skies, dirty yellow lights, Pepe the Frog green bikes. Do I need to be on drugs to understand them?

This painting depicts a reaper at the top of some subway steps wieldinga bike object. Josh Smith makes his paint the consistency of a high-class moisturizer. Slippery but not drippy. The line bears no pretense of elegance. It has a hand-wavy quality, a little flutter that gives you the sense of an activity that may vibrate to the point of falling apart.

It is a good example of Smith's tendency to turn an image into a symbol. The amalgamated reaper and bike form an X shape in the middle of the canvas. I closed my eyes and tried to deepen my connection to the piece. But the symbol became an obstacle barring the way to the city and to life itself. The British slang term "Christ on a bike!" connotes surprise.++

This image is of inevitability.

In some areas of these canvases, the figure, bike, and bike chain become obnebulated. AIhas given up, and the artist has rendered its ejecta as is. Abstraction that is merely confusion.

In an attempt to reach out to Consciousness, I took dowsing rods to the gallery. They can also be used to foretell the future or divine hidden truths by bypassing the mind's logical processes. Unfortunately, although they told me where the water pipes were in the building when I asked, "Is this a good painting?" They did not respond.

Conclusion:

What can I understand about Josh Smith's new show at David Zwirner Gallery called Destiny in terms of quantum Consciousness?

Embrace Uncertainty.

Smith's work thrives on contradiction. Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, let them exist simultaneously, much like a quantum system holds multiple potentials. That state of not-knowing is central to the experience.

Deep Seek.

*"Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach" by Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin, January 2021

+According to Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, "A structure trapped in an endless feedback loop of self-referentiality." https://iai.tv/video/the-language-of-the-unconscious

++Similar, less common variations include "Christ on a stick" or "Christ on a cracker."

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thanks Millree - deep dive into AI and risk

The underworld carnival mask shares the high risk thrill of urban youth culture – train surfing, skateboard stunts & those tags on impossible hi-rise construction projects & bridges where there is no safe place to stand. (an “angel spot” )– in a kid’s mind the risk is the payoff.

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Routes/Roots

Millree Hughes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:58:53 +0000

Routes/Roots Millree Hughes February 3, 2026 - 19:58

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Odila Donald Odita: Shadowland
Kordansky Gallery, NYC
January 15 – February 28, 2026

"Fear is the flash, the gorgeous dress our skeleton wears." - Dambudzo Marechera.

It's better if the content of a painting is clear or at least available when you look at it. If not, you need a statement to guide the observer. Often, with abstract painting, writing the statement may require more lucubration than usual. Why these colours, why these forms as opposed to any others? It might end up being as significant an artwork as the paintings themselves.

Odili Donald Odita creates acrylic paintings and wall murals. He was born in Nigeria and raised in America. He has made the intersection of the two cultures a reason for making the work.

This is Odita's second show at Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea. He has included some paintings by his father, who was an artist in Nigeria, and some of his own identity-oriented photographic work from the '00s. The inclusions suggest that he's not sure if the work will communicate its purpose without some background information. The rest of the show is work made in 2025.

At some point in the late '90s, the influence of Illustrator, the vector graphics editing program, was felt across the visual culture. The patterns were used for digital wallpaper, desktop backgrounds, and in the physical world, sometimes as nightclub murals. They seemed to reflect the digital optimism of the era. You could hover over an area with your dropper tool and fill it with your bucket tool in any colour you fancied. Fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg used it to update Emilio Pucci's patterns, and some artists decided that the vector images might make good paintings. It was a large part of Franz Akkerman's work. I think I noticed it first in 2000 in a Mathew Ritchie show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

But after a while, it faded away. There were all kinds of other ways to make images on the computer.

Once Odita had adopted the look, he took a few years to refine it and then produced a lot of quite similar-looking paintings. There are some key motifs in the work. The squashed and fractured stripe painting that might be seen as a landscape, as inHeavy 2025 or Future Perfect from 2008. The loose verticals with a diagonal cut, as in Cut 2025 or Cut 2016 (lithograph). There are the diamond-shaped patterns that appear to have a figure in the middle that could either be "Nude Descending a Staircase," or a figure (sometimes figures) dancing. Like "Protector" in this show or "Here and There" from 2008. You get the idea.

There are lots of interviews online in which the artist talks about his relationship to Nigeria and how it informs his work, yet "Protector" has twenty-eight different colours. I still can't pick out which ones are Igbo and which are American. It's not like looking at a Mary Heilman. There is a lot to choose from. Also, I don't know why a digitally derived image should be a painting rather than a print. The associations are with weaving and block printing, so is the complete lack of human touch somehow ironic? Only the slightly raised ridge along the taped edges remains.

Protector, 2025 acrylic on canvas 90 x 40 x 1 3/8 inches

But more than that, there is a caution at the centre of the work that I can't ignore. For example, he often uses a marigold yellow as a highlight colour, but unlike Akkerman, he can't let it stand on its own. In "Camouflage," on either side of this coloured shape, there is a sliver of yellow ochre, or in other places, it has been backgrounded by a low-key azure blue. One shape has a line of dusty mauve running through it, but despite being its colour opposite, it merely subdues it. The whole effect throughout is one of balance, of resolution. The colour arrangements have sanded down any rough edges, and the forms themselves have suffered from the heavy toll that Shutterstock vector wallpapers have demanded. It looks too much like graphic design.

"How do you observe a stone that is about to strike you?" - Dambudzo Marechera

Watching them pluck our friends and neighbours, our loved ones, out of the crowd because of the colour of their skin is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. But anger and fear alone cannot make great art. Max Beckmann's ghastly shadows depended on his detachment, and David Hammons' blade was whetted by critical judgment.

I don't think all artists should or could be actively political; the act itself is political.
I understand that Odita came up at a time when it was harder for black artists to get gallery shows; he may have felt it was necessary to get his point across subtly. But today, I believe, if it can be said, it should be said without a filter.

Odita's statement at the gallery's front desk asks you to consider his work as a philosophical reflection and a meditation on how political forces shape what you perceive. It's a lot for this work to carry.

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modernism (post modernism)

thanks for your concise review of these vigorous works by O. D. Odita, released amid the turmoil of today's unacceptable reality. Odita's work reminds me of another black artist, William T Williams, who chose a similar path: hard edge colors in a structure influenced by the Bauhaus and the geometric fan-shaped spectrums of Frank Stella. In the figurative world, there is also a hard edge approach to the heart-wrenching stories painted in modestly small tempera panels by Jacob Lawrence. At the end of 2025, the Jewish Museum celebrated Ben Shahn, at a time where being Jewish is under increasing attack. As you mention, not everyone can take to the high ground of political commentary.

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Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:15:57 +0000

Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins Thalia Vrachopoulos February 2, 2026 - 12:15

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Han Ho, 21c The Last Supper, 2017 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED 1,350x6x300(h)cm

Han Ho ETERNAL LIGHT
Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, N.J.
Nov 21st - Dec. 10th, 2025

I recently encountered a consummate and mature articulation of the aesthetic imagination in Han Ho’s solo exhibition, Eternal Light, at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. While differing from such artists’ work as Yuan Goang-Ming’s in his meditations on domestic fragility and geopolitical tension, it achieves an equal, if not markedly greater, degree of intensity. Internationally renowned for his monumental light sculptures, spatial installations, and large-scale works imbued with biblical and metaphysical symbolism, Han Ho constructs environments in which illumination itself becomes both the medium and the message, using Marshall McLuhan’s phrase.

Entering the exhibition resembled stepping into a prismatic, otherworldly field of perception rather than a conventional gallery setting. Vast luminous structures, radiant surfaces, and kinetic constellations of LED punctures upon traditional Korean Hanji paper generated a transcendental atmosphere of refracted light that seemed to suspend gravity. In a way, such an experience inevitably recalled the medieval cosmology of Robert Grosseteste, for whom lux was not simply illumination but the metaphysical origin of matter; the first corporeal form from which spatial extension and physical reality unfolded. In Han Ho’s installations, a comparable intuition is materialised sensorially. Light operates simultaneously as both the material and the ontological agent, shaping space while also suggesting its own pre-existence to it.

This metaphysical primacy of illumination finds a particularly forceful expression in the monumental work 21C The Last Judgement. A vast mixed-media composition of charcoal, oil with traditional black ink, Korean paper, and embedded LED constellations, in which light operates not merely as an accent but as the principal medium from which the entire visual field emanates. At once painting, relief, and glowing installation, the work evokes the grand iconographic lineage of Western art history, especially Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Simultaneously, the piece displaces it into a contemporary register marked by nuclear anxiety, territorial divisions, and the fragile dialectics between war and peace reminiscent, in thematic gravity, of Yuan Goang-Ming’s reflections on state fragility and mediated disaster. Yet where Yuan often situates the viewer within the hyperreal circuitry of simulation, Han Ho propels the spectator toward a more cosmic horizon.

Structured in a tripartite vertical narrative of celestial aspiration above, the anguished threshold of lived reality at the center, and the infernal debris of human destruction below, the composition stages an allegorical drama in which clouds oscillate ambiguously between heavenly vapor and nuclear mushroom, embodying the Janus-like conceit of humanity’s technological triumph and existential peril. The punctured Korean paper, illuminated from within by LED light, produces an ethereal radiance that renders figures and gestures almost immaterial, as though suspended in an aethereal continuum where matter itself seems provisional; this internal luminosity simultaneously evokes the silent diffusion of radioactive glow and the spectral afterimage of irradiated atmospheres of nuclear fallout. Subtly interwoven into this vertical apocalypse is the unresolved memory of Korea’s partition, whose geostrategic fracture reverberates less as a cartographic fact than as a psychic and metaphysical condition.

Han Ho, 21c The Last Judgment, 2022 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED Variable Install

This particular concern likewise inflects the almost stereographic The Last Supper, in which Han Ho extends his theology of light into a historical and political allegory, reconfiguring Leonardo’s canonical tableau as the Last Supper of the Twenty-First Century and inscribing it with the unresolved tensions of the Korean peninsula. Christ occupies the center not as a doctrinal sovereign but as a luminous nucleus of life, of inexhaustible radiant vitality amidst collective precarity. Around him, the disciples are reimagined as fractured embodiments of contemporary subjectivity. A uniformed NBC-clad sentinel registers nuclear anxiety, and the aluminum mirror embedded in a Chinese costume reflects not only the spectator but also the weight of hostile forces bearing upon the peninsula. The nude figures facing toward a primordial Korea, silently split across the pictorial axis into North and South. Upon the table, symbolic objects such as tanks and barbed wire cruelly transmute into aestheticized toys, Peter’s denied chicken, kimchi as a sign of cultural homogeneity, and the sushi bomb as purposeless destruction, coalesce into a post-modern still life of poised devastation.

However, it is again light that confers metaphysical coherence upon this dense iconography. These images resist total instrumentalization even within a technologically mediated platform, understanding the form as a vital force rather than an inert representation. In a way, light here becomes a spectral intermediary, binding fractured histories, divided territories, and dispersed identities into a single, trembling field of presence; an eschatological supper staged at the end of time and history.

My encounter with Han Ho’s Eternal Light at Mana Contemporary became an occasion to contemplate through association the unsettling proximity of large-scale annihilation, sensing that the spectre of a global war no longer belongs solely to speculative discourse but hovers as a tangible possibility within the collective imagination. Yet the exhibition does not succumb to despair; rather, it staged the primordial element of light as a fragile but persistent counterforce, offering these aesthetic environs in which existential fear and the enduring human impulse face toward transcendence.

Han Ho’s sublime works, radiating an otherworldly glow, function as a spectacular luminescent architecture of consciousness, dissolving the boundary between sensuous experience and philosophical inquiry. In a way, Han Ho strongly affirms that even when art confronts the imagery of conflict and violence, it retains the singular capacity to momentarily liberate the observer from the contingencies of personal will and social turmoil, reconstituting the viewer as a disinterested and lucid subject of pure contemplation.

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Surface Tension

Millree Hughes — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:29:05 +0000

Surface Tension Millree Hughes December 14, 2025 - 15:29

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Lynn Chadwick: Hypercycle - Chapter II: Archetype (1963-1977)

Perrotin Gallery, NYC

Til Dec 20th

Herbert Read used the term "Geometry of Fear" in his introductory essay for the show he had curated as part of the British entry for the Venice Biennale of 1952, "New Aspects of British Sculpture."

Lynn Chadwick's pieces from that show, Beast, Bullfrog, and Maquette for an Unknown Prisoner, were in keeping with his theme of sculpture that emanated the collective anxiety of the post-war period.

He would later distance himself from the appellation, believing that his work did not have much to do with the war. I think he was more concerned with alluding to the engineering and architecture of rebuilding, while also evoking the landscape the British soldiers had been fighting for.

The small figures in the Perrotin show appear with their gowns caught in the breeze, advancing on tiny tarsi, ready to fly. This entomological association contrasts with the more industrial structures that appear to be just beneath the surface in other pieces.

"Sitting Elektra II" (1968) is an elegant female figure that resembles a resting dancer, with a bright triangular face and a bob haircut. Her small breasts and a possibly newly fertilized belly are represented on a highly polished square breastplate that contrasts with the rest of the grey figure. The posture with its broad shoulders and erect head has the quality of theatrical catalepsy. Like a figure chosen from the audience for a hypnosis act.

"Monitor" from 1965 is a tall piece that appears to have a soft, tentlike body with a batwing motif on the surface that suggests the nature of its understructure. It has a more manufactured "head" composed of two thinly separated, lens-like structures. These two flat rings look manufactured, almost as if they were found objects. The name helps redirect the gaze back to the viewer. It could be a tower in Foucault's Panopticon system of surveillance.

The dusty, tan-coloured surface re-humanizes the object, making it more tactile.

Chadwick's pieces have a fascinating surface created by different firing techniques, ranging from an almost matte ceramic feel to the ashier, lead-like surfaces of the figures.

"I actually wanted to produce a sort of touchable object, a tangible object. I really wanted to do that rather than be involved with intangible things like architecture." - Lynn Chadwick

He began his sculptures with a steel skeleton, often adding clay to the interior so that the structure showed through. He would cover the armature, wholly or partly, with a composite of plaster and iron filings, working it with his hands or tools to generate a gesture-scaled surface. This was the master model for lost wax bronze casting. There were a lot of finished experiments made in the Lyppiat studio forge to create the texture and colour of the final piece.

We would all like a little more geometry with our fear. Ours seems to come from all directions with no visible structure behind it. Lynn Chadwick does not make ironic statements through highly polished surfaces, as many of our contemporary sculptors do. His work is intratextual, relating to other elements in this dimension that he has created rather than quoting from other artists. It is a singularly personal work that relies on imagination and observation.