Category: writing
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Chris Corales, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia (Artforum)
In his 2001 book Papier Machine, Jacques Derrida charts a cultural hierarchy of paper’s many purposes, from “priceless archive, the body of an irreplaceable copy, a letter or painting . . . as support or backing for printing” to, finally, the “throwaway object, the abjection of litter.” Chris Corales’s magpie practice restoratively collages found paper, cardboard, and related detritus…
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Jane Irish, Locks Gallery and Lemon Hill Mansion, Philadelphia (Frieze)
‘I think even in my art historical training I was colonized early on,’ artist Jane Irish observed in a 2018 interview with Nato Thompson, referring to her initial education as a painter in the French modernist tradition – ‘looking at Matisse, Courbet, Degas’ – at The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Maryland Institute (now MICA),…
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Jessi Reaves, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (Sculpture)
In Jessi Reaves’s recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, her sculptural furniture was integrated both formally and functionally with a group of surreal still-life paintings by fellow New Yorker Ginny Casey. Curator Charlotte Ickes described these complementary bodies of work as “two solo exhibitions.” The juxtaposition with Casey’s intensely colored paintings of unfinished objects and…
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“Alchemy, Typology, Entropy,” Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)
Alchemy, Typology, Entropy at Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, features painting and sculpture by three talented artists who live and work locally: Adam Lovitz, Peter Allen Hoffmann, and Alexis Granwell. The exhibition is one of several fantastic shows curated by Alex Baker this year—including Cryptopictos, Painters Sculpting/Sculptors Painting, and Person, Place or Thing—that collectively highlight the current energy, and formal and conceptual conversations, around painting…
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Ann Hamilton, Fabric Workshop and Museum and Municipal Pier 9, Philadelphia (Sculpture)
In an interview published by Philadelphia’s FringeArts (2016), Ann Hamilton describes the dual impulses behind her four-decade-long practice and the multi-site exhibition she had recently mounted in the city: “Watching a raw material become a single thread, join other thread to become a warp or weft of a cloth or carpet holds for me all…
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Ginny Casey, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)
It’s a common story of contemporary art for artists to describe abandoning the two-dimensional confines of traditional painting on canvas for the more immediate materiality of sculpture, installation, or performance. In her 2016 memoir, for example, academy-trained painter Marina Abramović recalls her decisive moment: “Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could…
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“Painters Sculpting/Sculptors Painting,” Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia (Artforum)
While critics frequently compare Dona Nelson to far more celebrated postwar painters, “Painters Sculpting/Sculptors Painting” instead placed her work in conversation with that of a diverse group of younger artists. Nadine Beauharnois, Matt Jacobs, and Marc Zajack, like Nelson, are based in the Philadelphia area and remain anchored to traditional forms of painting and sculpture…
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Pareidolia: Shawn Thornton’s hallucinatory visions
Witch Doctors at the Eye of the Solar Epoch (2008–10) is a long, landscape-oriented oil painting on panel whose dimensions and compositional structure resemble a folded-out paper map. In urgent hues, it presents a god’s-eye view of a watery city or an entire cosmos, punctuated with networks of mystical and mathematical symbols. Curving sections of pale…
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“Quicktime,” Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)
In his influential Art in America article “Provisional Painting” (2009), critic Raphael Rubinstein traced a history—from Joan Miró to Mary Heilmann—of “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling,” that “constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.” In Rubinstein’s analysis, this attitude provides an easier yoke for artists tired of laboring under modern painting’s grand and burdensome history.
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Douglas Witmer’s simplicity
It is timely that Douglas Witmer’s solo exhibition, “Dubh Glas” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (TSA) in Philadelphia, opened shortly after the Guggenheim’s Agnes Martin retrospective closed to the public. Witmer’s group of ten softly geometric, gesso and acrylic paintings on canvas are reminiscent in atmosphere and texture of Martin’s darker works, made in the mid-2000s,…