June 29, 2016 Look Intimisms By Dan Piepenbring “Intimisms,” a new group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, looks at the legacy of the Intimists, a group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists—Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among them—remembered for the rich closeness and empathy of their portraiture. The French writer and critic Camille Mauclair defined intimism as “psychologic poetry in painting … a revelation of the soul through the things painted, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance, the intimate meaning of the spectacles of life … the daily tragedy and mystery of ordinary existence, and the latent poetry in things.” The artists in this exhibition aim to further that tradition. Gahee Park, Night Talk, 2016, oil on canvas, 85″ x 65″. Read More
June 21, 2016 Look Catch the Heavenly Bodies By Dan Piepenbring Jay Miriam’s first solo show in New York, “Catch the Heavenly Bodies,” opens tonight at Half Gallery. “I think there’s something strange going on right now,” Miriam, who paints from memory, told Adult Magazine last year: “People aren’t okay with being ordinary. I think that sentiment has existed for a long time, but it feels really amplified right now with social media and our online culture, where everyone’s competing for attention, and even being normal is a trend. I don’t see ordinariness as negative. The characters in the paintings can be anyone. Even though I like painting women, they’re not necessarily defined as women … Now everyone is so aware of their behavior and how it looks to others, and there’s not the same freedom in our bodies.” Jay Miriam, Fountain of Youth, 2016, oil on linen, 64″ x 50″. Read More
June 17, 2016 Look Extraordinary Rendition By Tom Overton Edmund Clark, The building at Antaviliai, erected on the site of the paddock of the former riding school. © Edmund Clark, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery In 1968, the CIA set out to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific. For the sake of discretion, the work was subcontracted to Global Marine (Glomar), a private company that specialized in ocean-floor drilling. When the journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi tried to find out more under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA would “neither confirm nor deny” that there were documents about the ship used, the Glomar Explorer, or documents about their censorship. No information passed into the public sphere, but a new term did: “The Glomar Response.” It lives on, underpinning everything in Crofton Black and Edmund Clark’s book on more recent CIA activities, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition. Read More
June 15, 2016 Look Road Trip By Dan Piepenbring Greg Drasler’s exhibition “Road Trip” opens tonight at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Reservations, 2014, oil on linen, 40″ x 44″. Read More
June 8, 2016 Look Henchman of Chance By Dan Piepenbring Daniel Spoerri has been making “trap pictures” since the late fifties. His procedure is simple: he goes to a flea market or a dump, riffles through heaps of trash or near-trash, recovers whatever discarded objects strike his fancy, and hangs them on the wall. Describing himself as “a henchman of chance,” Spoerri is especially drawn to the detritus that remains unsold at the end of a flea market. His latest set of assemblages, “What Remains,” is on display at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna through July 23. Spoerri’s portfolio with Emmett Williams, “An Anecdoted Topography of Chance,” appeared in our Winter 1966 issue. Daniel Spoerri, #23 Flohmarkt Wien, April 2016, 2016, assemblage, 47″ x 34″ x 17″. Read More
June 1, 2016 Look Cars Plunge and Lava Flows By Dan Piepenbring Ken Price, who died in 2012, is remembered as a sculptor, but he was also a talented illustrator—his ideal day, he once said, would be spent drawing while listening to jazz. More than forty of his drawings are on display through June 25 at Matthew Marks Gallery. “I’ve been drawing since I can remember,” Price said. “I think sculptors learn to draw so that they can see what they’ve been visualizing.” Ken Price, Car Plunge, 1994, acrylic and ink on paper, 14″ x 11 1/4″. Read More