Stanley Rosen: Slabs and coils, scallops and disks February 6, 2021 2:30 pm
Stanley Rosen, installation view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects
Contributed by Rachel Youens / Stanley Rosen came of age as a sculptor during the 1960s and 1970s, when ceramicists and sculptors were challenging the hegemonic hold that painting had in the art world as the medium of heroic significance. His sculptures are made at a modest scale that, somewhat paradoxically, implies monumentality. Incorporating and cross-pollinating vessels and architecture, his formal language adapts traditional methods to new expressions. He employs slabs, coils, scallops, disks, and tiles. Most works are unglazed in various earthen clay hues – ochers, siennas, or charcoal – leaving us to ponder porous or metallic surfaces. Crucially, Rosen’s forms accommodate the spatial limits they meet and inhabit, welcoming viewers in.
February 5, 2021 9:26 am
Angela Dufresne, installation view at Yossi Milo
Contributed by Andrew Woolbright / Angela Dufresne’s dual shows at Yossi Milo Gallery and M+B Los Angeles provide an opportunity to assess the full breadth of this influential figurative painter’s practice. The two shows, opened in tandem, nearly emptied her studio. The exhibits pose new paths forward from John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage’s discourse on figural strategies, while embodying challenges to normative conventions of authorship and new approaches to the queer and post-humanist philosophies of Jack Halberstam and others, championing difference and community over the canon’s tired obsession with the individual.
Salman Toor: There’s a boy I know January 9, 2021 12:52 pm
Salman Toor,
The Star, 2019
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently on view in the Whitney Museum’s first-floor lobby gallery (free of charge to the public). And rightly so. Toor’s pictures touch the heart, and his audacious drawing and sensitive paint handling satisfy our aesthetic longings.
Salman Toor, Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, 2019
Curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Abrika Trasi, “How Will I Know” – the title comes from the eponymous Whitney Houston song – is Toor’s first solo museum show, and likely not his last. With fifteen fairly small oil on panel paintings
December 31, 2020 11:30 am
Shari Urquhart,
Wedding Portrait (J. Van Eyck), 1998, Persian wool, mohair, metallic acrylic & silk fibers, 79.5 x 67.75 inches
Lamentable deaths occur every year, but in 2020 Covid-19 has made for an especially grim atmosphere of loss. In the art world, painter Jackie Saccoccio and art historian Barbara Rose are the most recent to be mourned across social media and in thoughtful obituaries in the New York Times
. Artnet has compiled a list of other notable art figures who have passed away, including Beverly Pepper, Emily Mason, William Bailey, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Susan Rothenberg, Ron Gorchov, and Luchita Hurtado. ArtForum
‘s list includes Ulay, John Baldessari, Christo, Suh Se-ok, and May Stevens. At artcritical