Category: Painting

Modern Art, Painting

Joan Mitchell: To Define a Feeling, 1960-1965

David Zwirner, New York, November 6–December 13, 2025.

At David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery, To define a feeling, 1960–1965 zeroed in on a short, charged span in Joan Mitchell’s practice. Curated by Sarah Roberts with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the show brought together canvases and works on paper from the so-called “black paintings” years, when Mitchell tightened the palette, stacked brushwork into dense verticals, and let black and white flare through restrained color.

Several loans and foundation works clarified the transition from the Paris move to the fuller chroma of the later French years. You could feel her testing speed and structure, especially in the ravishing charcoal sketches. The title came from a 1965 remark of hers – they were attempts to catch sensation before it turns into a picture.

The exhibition formed part of the artist’s centennial programming, one node among museum events and publications that traced her influence. It also marked a return to Chelsea, with Zwirner presenting a period that often gets overshadowed by the late sunflowers.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Maria Lassnig: Self with Dragon

Hauser and Wirth, Hong Kong Sept 26 2025 to Feb 28 2026

Hauser & Wirth’s Hong Kong exhibition of Maria Lassnig last year felt like a clear, unsentimental reminder of how much of contemporary figurative painting still sits in her shadow. The show gathered works from the 1960s through the early 2000s and framed them not as historical artifacts but as still-charged experiments in how a body can be felt, pictured, or even invented. Lassnig called it “body awareness,” which sounds gentle enough until you’re in front of the paintings. They’re anything but soft. They are negotiations between sensation and representation, full of edits, ruptures, and moments where the figure seems to peel itself out of the paint in real time.

The curators made a smart decision to avoid overloading the space. Hong Kong can overwhelm quickly; here, the relative sparseness gave each canvas room to broadcast its pressure. Early works like Self-Portrait with Telephone positioned her as an artist already suspicious of realism’s promises. The body is both there and not there, rendered in zones of color rather than anatomical confidence. You sense she’s painting what she feels rather than what she sees, and sometimes the feeling isn’t particularly coherent. That incoherence is the point. Lassnig trusts it more than a mirror.

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Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025



Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).

If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.

Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.

Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio

Hauser and Wirth, New York, 1 May to 1 August, 2025

The show’s organizing idea is disarmingly simple and, for Kentridge, unusually literal: the studio as a thinking machine. Kentridge has described the studio as “an enlarged head,” a place where the world comes in, gets broken into fragments, and returns as drawing, performance, or text. (Hauser & Wirth) That statement can read like artist talk boilerplate until you are in the installation, where the “head” is not metaphorical but procedural. The show was built around his episodic film “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” and then surrounded the viewer with the working material that makes that film possible: drawings, paper fragments, revisions, and sculptural props that feel as if they have wandered out of rehearsal. (IFPDA)

The exhibition is not a greatest-hits survey. Instead of treating film, drawing, and sculpture as parallel lanes, it shows their cross-contamination. The film’s premise, a self-portrait displaced onto a domestic object, lets Kentridge do what he does best: think in public. The coffee pot is comic, but it is also a constraint, a way to keep autobiography from turning sentimental. That emphasis on apparatus is why the show feels closer to a studio visit than to a polished museum narrative. (The World Of Interiors)

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting

Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York
April 15 to July 11, 2025


In spring–summer 2025, Gagosian’s Chelsea space at 555 West 24th Street reopened with “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting,” curated by Cecilia Alemani (High Line Art). The exhibition ran from April 15 and was extended through July 11, 2025.

Although frequently described as “retrospective-like,” it was more accurately a deliberately edited, museum-caliber survey: 24 works spanning 1944–1986, installed across the gallery’s rooms in a way that encouraged viewers to read de Kooning’s career as recursive rather than linear. (The show’s checklist numbers 24 objects, including two bronzes and 22 paintings; this “distillation” was part of its point.)

What made the show feel unusually “retrospective” for a commercial gallery wasn’t only the historical range, but also its curatorial thesis and its institutional muscle. Alemani and Gagosian secured significant museum loans—most prominently MoMA’s “Untitled V” (1982) and the Guggenheim’s “…Whose Name Was Writ in Water” (1975).

The title “Endless Painting” functions as both description and argument. In the supporting materials around the show, the phrase is explicitly linked to de Kooning’s “ever-evolving” pictorial language and to his oft-cited habit of stopping rather than finishing—“just stop”—a stance that frames revision, scraping-back, and perpetual re-beginning as the medium’s true subject.

Alemani’s key curatorial move was to reject a strictly chronological narrative in favor of what she described (in preview coverage) as an exhibition that “skips and jumps” and “creates rhymes” across decades. In practical terms, this meant engineering sightlines and adjacencies that made repetition legible: a 1940s work could “echo” a late ribbon painting; an iconic mid-career figure could be made to reverberate against a near-abstract contour from the 1980s.

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Drawing, Painting

Casper David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 8 to May 11, 2025

The Met billed this as the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich, bringing together roughly 75 works across oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches, plus selected works by contemporaries to sharpen the context.

The curatorial intelligence (by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein) was to resist the one-image shorthand that tends to follow Friedrich, especially the meme-ified cliche of “Wanderer,” and to build an argument out of motifs. The press material lays those themes out explicitly: spirituality and religion, the infinite and unknowable, time and mortality, solitude and companionship, the familiar versus the unknown, and the perilous beauty of the sublime.

Early Friedrich appears as draftsman and printmaker, someone who draws outside, tests techniques, and only later, steps into oil with public ambition. The Met’s “Inside the Exhibition” material emphasizes that trajectory, and in the galleries you could feel it: the authority of pencil and wash, the way a plant study or a rocky outcrop can serve as a rehearsal for metaphysical drama. Friedrich’s breakthrough ink-wash drawings, made for public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar, and these don’t “illustrate” Romanticism so much as manufacture a mood.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Livien Yin: Thirsty

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.


https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/

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Painting

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2024 to January 26, 2025

I spent the morning in Gallery 999, and “breathtaking” feels like an understatement. This show is a focused, high-stakes argument for Siena as the true cradle of the Renaissance, or at least one of its primary tributaries. The curators have staged it like a darkened, monastic vault. Against black walls, the gold grounds of these 700-year-old panels glow.

Simone Martini’s Precision

While Duccio is the technical anchor of the show, the Simone Martinis are the absolute stars. Seeing the reassembled Orsini Polyptych is a rare privilege. Each panel is roughly the size of a sheet of paper, but the emotional scale is massive. In The Entombment, the grief is etched into the frantic, weeping faces of the figures. Martini’s line is incredibly sophisticated, sharper and more “Gothic” than his contemporaries. He manages to make tempera seem like silk.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Gary Hume

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023

These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.


The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.

The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.

Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

John Hoyland: “Thresholds, Paintings 1965-1970”

Hales Gallery, New York, 1 December 2023 – 20 January 2024

A post-war abstract painter, Hoyland explored from London a parallel course to his contemporary New York painters in the abstract expressionist movement. This show at Hales Gallery highlights his investigation in acrylics, with layering, staining and other inventive mark-making.

From the Hales exhibition:
Hoyland (b.1934 Sheffield, UK – d.2011 London, UK) was one of the most inventive and dynamic abstract painters of the post-war period. Over the span of more than a half-century his art and attitudes constantly evolved. A distinctive artistic personality emerged, concerned with color, painterly drama, with both excess and control, with grandeur and above all, with the vehement communication of feeling.  

-Hales exhibition catalogue
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