Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York Jun 6–Sep 25, 2021
Cezanne: Drawing
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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.
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:
-Hales exhibition catalogue
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.
Robert Ryman: 1961-1964
David Zwirner, New York, November 9, 2023—February 3, 2024
Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930 – February 8, 2019) was an American conceptual artist closely identified with the high modernist Minimalist mode of painting in the 1960’s. Interestingly he did not attend an art school or program of art studies at a university. Instead, his visual interests began when he worked as a security guard at MoMA, befriending fellow employees Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin.
From the David Zwirner exhibition text:
Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
David Zwirner Gallery
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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