Abstract painting requires a huge amount of faith in oneself. The process is mysterious and almost impossible to teach, as each artist needs to find his/her own way. If one can approach each painting having the love and trust that things will be all right, that an image will come eventually, we will make the […]

Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled […]

Happily, the best of 2013 was not the biggest. Happily, because art–and the market that seems to drive it–has trended toward the big: the big wall-power painting and print, the gigantor sculpture; and the big spaces and names that can accommodate. But what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, […]

Because it’s really that place which is unreachable … at which the poem becomes ours… A personal note. For all of the what seemed, between 2001 and 2007, the ugliest of hate feuds, I turned to four poets—not for solace, but for connection. I was in Jerusalem then, a city that too often gives as […]

© Magdalena Solé. From After the Water Receded. “The storms are getting worse–more frequent and more intense. And the science that says so blames climate change and points a finger at us.” That was the umph line in my comment back on October 16. A lot has happened since, storm-wise, and all of it bad. […]

Sir Anthony Caro, “Early One Morning.” 1962 © Anthony Caro Estate/Barford Sculptures Ltd. Image courtesy Tate Galleries, under fair use guidelines. If you’re old enough to remember the TV show that inspired the name of this post (both the British original and its American incarnation that aired on NBC a year after the BBC canned […]

The storms are getting worse–more frequent and more intense. And the science that says so blames climate change and points a finger at us. And rightly so. We know that the long term fix is the urgent fix, that we need to build smarter and in smarter places, and that we need to consume less. […]

The print—naked without the frame and the context of a formal space surrounding it—quickly succeeds or fails. Instead of looking at a great Robert Adams photograph, I’m simply looking at a print on a table, in the exact same way that I look at my own work, scrutinizing for flaws and moments of salvation. Photo […]

Def Louise Nevelson ‘Untitled.’ 1981. © Louise Nevelson Foundation, courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York. Remnants: Louise Nevelson & Aaron Siskind 19 September – 2 November ’13 Bruce Silverstein 535 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 212.627.3930 Thirty-two works by Nevelson and Siskind, most of them from early in the artists’ careers, are now […]

Different from his anyway knock-out show at Pace’s uptown gallery in 2010, Robert Ryman: Recent Paintings at Pace on 25th Street is all the more knock-out because daylight is let in. And this being Ryman, light–its kind and quality–is the whole shebang. Here, natural light makes the six small oil on cotton canvas paintings (2010-’11) […]