Tag: Modern Art

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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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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Modern Art, textiles

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, April 20 to Sept 13, 2025

Walk into Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at MoMA, and you’re not just entering a show, you’re stepping into a quiet insurrection that’s been stitching itself together across cultures. These labeled “craft” instead of “capital-A Art.”

This exhibition doesn’t simply display textiles alongside modern abstraction, it exposes how inseparable they’ve always been. The loom was never a footnote to the brushstroke; it was a parallel lineage, often overlooked because it was done by women, by Indigenous artists, by people whose hands weren’t holding oil paints in Paris but cotton threads in Peru, Ghana, or Gee’s Bend.

The show features works that blur the line between structure and spirit, labor and gesture. Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Rosemarie Trockel. But also artists who are less frequently canonized, bringing forward textile traditions embedded with political resistance, ritual, and cultural survival. What’s astonishing is not just how these works hold their own next to “pure” abstraction.

The warp and weft of this exhibit suggest that abstraction didn’t just emerge from cold, white studios filled with silence and theory. It also came from looms, from weaving circles, from hands repeating gestures older than the museums themselves.

Woven Histories is a tangle of narratives, materials, and meaning.

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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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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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Modern Art, Painting

Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks, 1900-1959

Pace Gallery, New York, November 10 – December 23, 2023

A fascinating show of Picasso’s sketchbooks ranging through his career at Pace.

From the Gallery’s site:

Organized in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Madrid (FABA)—with whom our gallery has maintained a longstanding relationship—this exhibition of Picasso’s sketchbooks will offer a unique and intimate view of the ways in which the artist worked, tracing the evolution of his observations and ideas into plans for his compositions across painting and sculpture.


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Modern Art, Painting

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
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Modern Art

Martín Ramírez: A Journey

Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York, Oct 26 to Dec 2 2017.

This show focuses on the structural repetition that defined Martín Ramírez’s work during his decades of institutionalization. The pieces here are a tight look at his specific visual vocabulary: the tunnels, the horsemen, and the architectural “stages” he built out of salvaged paper and paste.

Martín Ramírez
Martín Ramírez
Martín Ramírez

What stands out most in this selection is the technical rhythm. Ramírez uses parallel lines to create a sense of deep, recessed space that feels both cinematic and claustrophobic.

The work is intensely physical; you can see the seams where he joined scraps of paper together to create larger surfaces. There is a “Madonnas” series in the gallery that is particularly striking, showing how he could transform a simple, repetitive line into a monumental, draped form. There’s no wasted motion in these drawings. Despite the “outsider” label often attached to him, the work feels incredibly deliberate and mathematically precise. It’s a study in how a limited set of tools and a restricted environment can still produce a vast, expansive sense of travel.

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