Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Spring is in full bloom and it's one of the most beautiful times of year upstate. I'm looking forward to Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory, curated by David A. Ross at Kino Saito in Verplanck, NY, opening May 11. Farther north there are two notable shows opening on May 18 in Kinderhook: Other Realities (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms) at Bill Arning Exhibitions and Annie Bielski, Raw Footage at SEPTEMBER. Also opening May 18 is the Wassaic Project's summer exhibition Tall Shadows in Short Order. I recommend visiting Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson to see Lothar O ..read more

Welcome to the early edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to May art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Notable, must-see shows in Brooklyn include Emily Janowick at International Waters, Emily Roz at Auxilliary Projects, and Charlotte Zinsser at Haul. In Manhattan, Julia Bland has a new series of monumental woven and painted pieces at Derek Eller and Joanne Greenbaum is having her first solo at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Check out Two Coats contributors Anna Gregor at D.D.D.D. Projects and Natasha Sweeten at Satchel Projects. We also recommend Jennifer Coates at both H ..read more

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / On a warm, sunny day that teased people outdoors, I stepped into Zwirner to catch Joe Bradley’s current exhibition, “Vom Abend.” Nine large paintings gleamed within the pristine gallery. I’d in fact been on my way to see another show, but at Zwirner I lingered and I looked, unexpectedly beguiled. Pretty soon I relaxed and accepted I’d be here a while ..read more

Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back.  ..read more

Contributed by Anna Gregor / Ian Myers’ paintings blur the lines between art, nature, and miracle, asking what painting’s vocation is at a moment when anything can be art, nature is under threat, and miracles are unfathomable. His five paintings, on view in his solo show “immortal flub” at New Collectors Gallery, are obviously art. Rectangles do not occur in nature, nor do the white gallery walls on which his rectangular paintings hang. But these rectangles don't act like windows that allow us to enter an illusionistic space, as we expect from mimetic paintings. Nor do they reveal the human ha ..read more

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in th ..read more

Contributed by Adam Simon / I happened to visit Mary Carlson’s exhibition “Garden” at Kerry Schuss Gallery the day I finished reading Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, written in the 1950s. I’m not usually drawn to fantasy fiction – this book was a gift – but Peake’s dreamlike rendering of a forbidding castle with clinging ivy and bizarre inhabitants had me in thrall, primed to receive Carlson’s medieval world and its symbiotic relationships between plants and people. One of the characters in Titus Groan uses the ivy to scale the castle walls, while two others take t ..read more

Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists ..read more

Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / Some painters insist on calling themselves painters rather than artists, and it’s clear why. “Art” designates is a broad category that admits almost anything, while painting is a tradition centered on a medium. In his recent book, Duchamp’s Telegram, Thierry de Duve argues that, while Marcel Duchamp did not single-handedly invent art in general, he perceived and announced its arrival. Before that, art was inconceivable outside the context of specific media such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Duchamp’s insight, of course, did not spell the end of pa ..read more

Please join us: For the 2024 iteration of Dumbo Open Studios, painter and Two Coats publisher Sharon Butler will have some new paintings on view, and she has also organized “BIG TOP," an exhibition of 13 talented young artists she met while teaching in the University of Connecticut's MFA Program ..read more