July 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Richard Tuttle, Walking on Air, 1, 2008
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Art Fag City
Art Fag City: it ain’t art criticism.
Although you can leave your comments for each post on “artfagcity”, people usually choose not to take advantage of that option. Maybe it is for the best. But a recent post on the defacement of a Poussin painting at London’s National Gallery has stirred a heated discussion.
It seems that Will Brand of “artfagcity” seems...
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Sean Landers: Foolish without charm
It is about time to move away from the same old art of the previous posts and take a look at what is currently happening in painting.
Sean Landers’ show “Around the World Alone” at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York ended about a month ago. If you haven’t heard of him yet, you will not easily forget his work once you have seen it. I am sure that Sean Landers had to...
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Lucien Freud and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
What is striking about Freud’s painting “Man in chair” from 1985 are the sitter’s hands. Their rendering is not simply “realistic”, but physical. The amount of paint he uses for them and the man’s face does give them a fleshy presence.
When I first saw Freud’s painting, it made me think of Ingres “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin” from...
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Vija Celmins
Spiderwebs, deserts, ocean waves, starry skies. If you did not (or do not) know Vija Celmins, would you get excited by the images these words evoke? Maybe, if you are a romantic but probably not. These phenomena do not seem to make for interesting, yet alone “innovative” art. But Vija Celmins manages to engage her viewers with these topoi. In one way, all we see is exactly that:...
Painters of Today
Whenever I read about contemporary art or visit exhibitions and artist studios, it strikes me how often painters assume that their audience is either dumb or forgetful or both. Or, which is a more malignant suspicion of my own: What if they actually believe that they are part of some sort of avant-garde?
So-called “innovations”, “breaks with tradition” or art historical and pop cultural citations...
