Caroline Burton’s compelling in-betweenness
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
2d ago
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took the train to Trenton, New Jersey – TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES, the old slogan goes – to see Caroline Burton’s painting exhibition “Way Finding” at the Riverside Gallery in the New Jersey State Museum, which also includes a freestanding library, planetarium, theater, a natural history exhibit, an indigenous peoples’ exhibit, and the obligatory outdoor Calder. The complex, originally designed by Frank Grad and Sons of Newark and constructed in 1965, is a classic example of the liberal utopian/modernist cultural center typically frowned upon these days ..read more
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Vera Iliatova: Women in the studio, now and then
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
2d ago
Contributed by Larissa Bates / Vera Iliatova’s solo show “The Drawing Lesson,” on view at Nathalie Karg Gallery, offers cinematic montages of female artists at work in a Brooklyn studio. The nine gestural oil paintings in warm greys and buttery mauves, with skirted figures moving indoors to backlit space, mark a departure from the haunted pastoral landscapes of Iliatova’s previous exhibitions. The dappled light, painterly marks, and muted pallet of the composite narrative interiors bring to mind Susan Lichtman as well as Manet. Gritty barges, a consistent motif of Iliatova’s, chug up the East ..read more
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Beatrice Caracciolo: Exquisitely stealthy
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
4d ago
Contributed by David Carrier / What does it mean for a contemporary artist to be inspired by an older text or artwork? The Gospel of Matthew 15:14 says: “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." Moved by those words in 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Blind Leading the Blind, which hangs in Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Now stirred by that picture, Beatrice Caracciolo, a young artist who grew up in that city, has drawn The Blind 16: one large image of the blind beggars and several smaller details also derived from the Bruegel. Between Matthew and Bruegel and th ..read more
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Andrea Belag: Fusing gesture, light and color
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
6d ago
Contributed by Riad Miah / Andrea Belag, in her current exhibition, "Twombly’s Green”at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, uses oil paint as a calligrapher might, employing sweeping gestural marks, scrapes, and wipes, as well as color itself, as her visual vocabulary. The paintings, of course, are not to be “read” in a linear manner but rather to be encountered and experienced.  ..read more
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Nora Riggs: Charming and more
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
6d ago
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Nora Riggs tells stories of our modern lives, recording their details. Her mindfully hung exhibition at Tappeto Volante, titled “Uneasy Listening,” traces how her paintings developed, beginning with four small gouaches placed on the lefthand wall of the front chamber. They appear as modest studies. But they also isolate anxious drama, such as that of a young woman searching for a missing earring on the dance floor, in a different way than the larger paintings in the main chamber do. The gouaches feel more interior, spotlighting vignettes, whereas the larger pai ..read more
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Mary Shah’s sense of direction
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
6d ago
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If the paintings in Mary Shah’s 2022 show “Dream Opera” suggested struggle from below against a resistant surface, her new ones in “Sunbird” – now on view at Rick Wester Fine Art and at least as impressive – declare liberation and ascent. Reinforcing this sense of breakthrough is a pronounced directionality, epitomized in Starlings (Jewel Street), whose arrow-like line zigs decisively to the left. The title presumably discloses Shah’s proximate visual inspiration. But, showcasing abstraction’s great virtue of allusiveness, which she is adept at harnessing, t ..read more
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Christopher Wool’s winning gambit
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
1w ago
Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve known Christopher Wool for a long time, since we were both teenage students at the New York Studio School in the 1970s. Philip Guston made annual visits and I remember his indignation at being asked to look at Christopher’s work. I believe he said that Wool’s all-over paintings should have been shown to someone like Larry Poons, not to him. In retrospect, Guston’s dismay seems to have been prescient and a little ironic. Wool’s breakout text paintings in the 1980s produced a similar response among painters as Guston’s cartoonish figure paintings had a decade ear ..read more
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Elizabeth Schwaiger’s deft summations
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
2w ago
Contributed by Peter Malone / Elizabeth Schwaiger’s paintings, recently shown in “Now & Now & Now” at Nicola Vassell Gallery, are inventive and visually compelling. Her confident brush handling is on full display across 30-plus panels that serve up disorderly interiors, some suggesting artists’ studios. One is apparently based on Picasso’s mid-century studio in Cannes, one of the most photographed art studios in history. Despite its internet-snatched-reversed-horizontal-copyright dodge, which flipped an art nouveau element with a nearby archway, Ward for Abiding Hubris confessed its so ..read more
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Howard Hodgkin’s Indian court collection: enigmatic or just good?
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
2w ago
Contributed by David Carrier / Some very successful artists are also collectors, and the art that artists collect can reveal or confirm something about their own work and social attitudes. For example, Edgar Degas’ abundant holdings included works by Édouard Manet, which shows that Degas elevated aesthetic qualities over political beliefs. Unsurprisingly, Pablo Picasso traded art with Henri Matisse. Given Picasso’s obsessive rivalry with the Frenchman, he must have enjoyed keeping score with his frenemy as well as infiltrating Matisse’s collection with his own work. What then are we to make of ..read more
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Allen-Golder Carpenter: Winter in America
Two Coats of Paint
by Two Coats Staff
2w ago
Contributed by Mary Jones / Allen-Golder Carpenter’s debut NYC show, “To Dream of Smoke,” examines the aesthetics of hip-hop culture as a window into “masculinity, pride, posturing, incarceration, censorship and social programming.” A gender non-conforming interdisciplinary artist, activist, and poet born in Washington, DC, in 1999, Carpenter’s view is personal and close to home. Their work centers on rap music as a vibrant expression of Black culture, including the discomfiting relationship rap often has to violence as a statement of manhood, and the subsequent trap of prison. Carpenter explo ..read more
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