Category: Painting

Contemporary Art, Painting

Kim McCarty: New Work

Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 26 to December 9, 2017.

Kim McCarty’s new watercolors are, as always, a masterclass in the “uncontrolled” controlled.

Her process involves working on wet paper, which gives her figures (mostly adolescents and botanical forms) this ghostly, translucent quality where the edges seem to be dissolving even as you look at them. There’s a specific kind of tension in these works; because the paint bleeds so freely, every mark feels like a gamble. In this new series, her palette remains muted. Washes of sepia, dusty rose, and bruised blues. These heighten the sense of vulnerability in her subjects. The figures aren’t just portraits; they are meditations on the instability of youth and the body. They feel less like solid things and more like memories that haven’t quite finished fading. It’s a beautiful, fragile show that reminds you how much power there is in the medium.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Kara Walker: The Most Astounding and Important Painting Show?

Sikkema Jenkins and Co, New York Sept 8 to Oct 21 2017

I walked into Sikkema Jenkins today expecting the usual sharp, clean edges of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, but what I found was something much more raw and chaotic.

The title of the show is a mouthful of 19th-century carnival barker bravado, but the work inside feels like a visceral rejection of the “blockbuster” expectations placed on her. Instead of paper cut-outs, the walls are covered in massive, gestural works using Sumi ink, oil stick, and collage on paper and linen. Pieces like U.S.A. Idioms and Christ’s Entry into Journalism are teeming with a kind of frantic, ink-splattered energy. Crowded scenes of protest, violence, and historical ghosts that feel like they were exorcised onto the page. There is a specific kind of “tiredness” mentioned in the press release (a fatigue with being a “role model” or a “voice”) and you can feel that weight in the brushstrokes. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant because it refuses to be polite or easily consumable. It’s like reading someone’s most private, feverish late-night sketches, only magnified to a monumental scale.

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

David Hockney: A Retrospective

Centre Pompidou, Paris. 21 June to 23 October 2017

The David Hockney retrospective in 2017 was a global event, but seeing it at the Pompidou—with its industrial “inside-out” architecture contrasting against Hockney’s saturated, sun-drenched canvases—was a singular experience. It was a celebration of his 80th birthday and an example of how an artist can stay relentlessly modern.

The Pools and the Portraits

The show is massive… over 160 works… and seeing the “canonical” Hockney pieces in person is a reminder of why they became icons in the first place. A Bigger Splash (1967) is much more technical than you’d think; the way he painted the water spray with tiny, deliberate brushes makes the “instant” moment feel like it took a lifetime to capture.

But it’s the double portraits that stopped me. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is haunting in person. There is a specific kind of stillness in those 1970s paintings, a domestic tension that is both incredibly chic and also unnerving.

The Technophile

The most surprising part of the show is the final rooms. Most artists “slow down” or get traditional as they hit their 70s and 80s. Hockney did the opposite. Seeing a wall of iPad drawings, luminous, neon-bright landscapes of Yorkshire, proves he is more obsessed with the now than artists half his age.

He’s spent sixty years asking the same question: How do we actually see the world? Whether he’s using a Polaroid camera, a fax machine, or a tablet, the answer is always the same: with total, unadulterated joy.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Reading this back, I realize that 2017 was a pivot point. We thought that was the “final” retrospective, but Hockney just kept going. He spent the pandemic in Normandy painting the arrival of spring on his iPad, and those works have since become their own chapter in art history.

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