Matthew Marks Gallery. 522 West 22nd street. Terry Winters: Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook. Through April 14th

Matthew Marks Gallery

Terry Winters first became popular in the 80's and early 90's by creating very elegant, painterly abstractions. I'm making a distinction between the term abstraction and non-representation, because his paintings, while abstract, contained images of (or at least references to) things outside themselves. Usually he'd find inspiration in plant life, cell structure, and architectural forms like the geodesic dome. With most of this work it was difficult to determine what the images were representations of, but the drawing was always so specific that it was clear that the images had some representational source. I remember somewhere reading that Winters viewed painting as a means of creating hybrids of visual information.

Then, some time in the early 90's Winters changed styles. He did away with the organic colors and forms, and started painting these very graphic lines that would criss cross at tight angles. The lines would form structures, almost like he was making some very primitive architectural blueprint. His colors also became very garish, and deliberately ugly. Clearly he was challenging himself in order to avoid complacency. He was rebelling against the very things he made his name on, the things he was good at. While I admire his courage, and ambition in branching out like he did, I have to say I didn't much care for the paintings. I found them unresolved both aesthetically and conceptually, and I couldn't see where he was going with them.

Well, apparently this is where he was going. I'm told in the Press release that the term "Tessellation Figures" refer to the process of creating a two-dimensional plane through the repetition of a geometric shape. I guess the mathematical concept of knot theory also inspires some of the work. I have no idea what "Cricket Music" is. But, whatever the source, this is a stunning show. It consists of eleven paintings, nine of which are exactly the same size (76"x80"). The other two are slightly larger. The structure of the images are based on the grid, but are broken up into richly layered planes of light. The grids are warped, and overlap thus creating an asymmetry and an ambiguous sense of space. I couldn't help but think that they looked almost like someone had thrown a cinder block into a Rothko, thus shattering his giant silhouetted blocks of color, and turning them into broken shards flying through space. Those shards never completely leave the picture plane though. They look kind of like they're at a state where they haven't yet deciding what form to take once they reconfigure.

In spite of Winters early popularity he's always been seen as kind of a painters painter. I guess that's because he's always stayed true to that painterly non objectivist ideal, and even when the paintings weren't all that successful, he appeared to be very sincere in terms of process. It became very clear to me while I was looking at this work that if it wasn't for the Abstract Expressionist movement this kind of painting couldn't exist, but I was also acutely aware of why that movement was so important. The Abstract Expressionists, with their large scale, painterly, non objective, nonrepresentational canvases created a new and original identity for painting. A painting was no longer a picture, but an arena. An arena where activities, and interactions of color and form occur. What happened inside the framework of the canvas was not an image, but an event. The people who don't understand Abstract Expressionism do so because they never learned to adjust to this radical new way of seeing. They have my sympathy, because they truly do not know what they're missing. Winters is a virtuoso at this kind of painting.

MOMA. 11 West 53rd street William deKooning: A Retrospective, through Jan 9th

William deKooning: A Retrospective, through Jan 9th

I've been kind of busy of late and haven't had time to put up any posts, but I had to write something about this. Let me say ahead of time whatever I say won't be enough. This is a big show (comprising nearly 200 paintings, drawings, and sculpture) covering the seven decade career of a hugely important artist. If you care at all about painting, or more generally art, or even more generally visually interesting experiences then I can not urge you enough to see this show. It's always a good sign when you leave the museum feeling like someone gave you a shot of adrenaline. That's how I felt when I walked out of the MoMA.

There's a quote at the beginning of the exhibition by deKooning that reads something like (I'm paraphrasing) "I'm not interested in making a good painting, but in seeing how far I can take it". This deceptively simple statement really sets the tone for the exhibit. He's considered one of the two or three major figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and along with Jackson Pollock, is known for an improvisational "action painting" technique and, all over or non-hierarchtical compositions. The other thing he's known for is reacting against the ideals of non-representation by reintroducing the figure into his work. If this retrospective proves anything it should prove that this second part of his reputation is complete bullshit. He never reintroduce representation, because he never abandoned it in the first place. DeKooning never bought into the pure abstractionist ideals of the time, as the critics then would have you believe. He simply saw nonrepresentational form as a newer exciting vehicle that alongside representational form could expand his vocabulary as an artist. He embraced the contradiction between these kinds of imagery, which is one of the things that made his paintings so good. He never cared about theory, or ideology. Just painting, and damn could he ever paint.

In the first gallery we see the mark made on him by artists like de Chirico, Miró, Picasso, Mattise, and Mondrian in the 1920's and 30's. While their influence stayed with him throughout his career, they too were just tools for his ever evolving artistic repertoire. What's most visible are his amazing gifts as colorist and draftsman in these paintings and drawings . In the next gallery we see him abandon both those talents to create the black and white abstractions of the '40's that earned him his first significant recognition. Then, over the years he slowly reintroduced color back into the work.

A lot is made of his "women" paintings of the early 1950's, where the figure dissolves into the background and then reconfigures. Maybe it's because these most directly utilize traditionally recognizable imagery. One of the things I find most interesting about these works is that he seems to use the figure to describe the paint more so than the other way around. Personally I prefer the more landscape inspired "full arm sweep" action paintings of the late 50"s and early 60's. The speed of the huge house painters brush creates more pictorial dynamism than just about any modernist artwork I can think of. Some of the brushstrokes are larger than the viewers standing in front of them. No one ever made paintings like these before deKooning, and the painters that did it after him didn't do it nearly as well. Nearly 50 years later they're still powerful and exhilarating to look at.

The next couple of galleries show his work from the mid '60's through 1980 where he incorporates the figure into a landscape space. He uses a really slippery wet on wet technique that he also finds a way to utilize in his bronze sculpture. In them, the clay looks like it was so wet and slippery you wonder how he managed to cast it. The nebulous painterliness of these 2 and 3 dimensional works show the influence of artists like Soutine, but I couldn't help thinking of Rubens. That would be if Rubens were a 20th century abstractionist maybe he would have painted like this. I don't know if anyone else will see that, but I did. I know, it's a stretch but... whatever.

Then in the last couple of galleries are the late stripped down work from the mid and late 80's which I''m not too crazy about. I think they were more a product of his declining physical and mental health than any artistic choice. But, I couldn't help but feel that if someone had never heard of deKooning's work, and was walking through this exhibit seeing it for the first time, they must be thinking "Wow! Now what does he do next?" I think this is the result of a kind of enthusiastic artistic openness. When I was in art school I remember a professor talking about open and closed paintings. She said that paintings should always start open, and then slowly start to close down as they develop. Some paintings never close down all the way, because once a painting's closed it's hard to open it up again. DeKoonings work always stayed open. I think that this was so that if he decided he hadn't taken them as far as he could, he had a way to go back in, and take them further. Always wide open, like his mind.

The New Museum, 235 Bowery. George Condo: Mental States, through May 8th

George Condo is an artist that's been around for as long as I can remember. Although surprisingly, he's not as old as you'd think. He first came to prominence in the early 80s, for painting what he called "fake old masters". He would reference a lot of art historical styles and imagery, and cross reference them with a lot of pop culture, and cartoon sources. These were the early stages of post modernism, so obviously he wasn't the only one at the time making these comments on high and low culture. What made him different though was (A) that he not only appropriated the imagery, but also the technique, and (B) the sheer variety of different source material he used. He contrasts Goya with Crazy Kat at one point, and Velazquez with Loony Toons at another. He takes these different styles, and exaggerates them, thus turning them into a clichés, which ultimately becomes his own distinctive style consisting of a language of clichés. The most obvious influence here is Philip Guston, the unsung (or at least less-sung) hero of the latter half of the 20th century. If it wasn't for Guston someone like Condo couldn't exist.

More than any other singular source, Condo makes a lot of references to Picasso. The way he distorts heads and faces in this hyper-cubist style is both silly and disturbing. It occurred to me at the show that he was combining Picassos early cubist experiments with his late Neoclassical period. So, the faces kind of looked like he had taken the big smooth, clunky late Picasso heads and put them through a coffee grinder, or some cubist slap chop (you know, from the infomercial), and come out with some kind of post modern cartoon mutants. To me it never comes off as parody though. He always seems very sincere in the way he handles the materials and subject matter. His knowledge of modernism's history of distorting the figure informs these faces. He seems to be channeling not just Picasso, but Bacon, DeKooning, Dubuffet, and Kokoschka. Maybe even Chagall. Eh, maybe not Chagall.

As retrospectives go, the show's pretty small. It starts on the 4th floor, where there's a large salon style wall covered with single figure compositions. They date from about 1984 to the present. I guess it's a recreation of an installation he did in 1985 at the Bruno Bischofberger gallery. Maybe it worked better then because it didn't cover such a huge span of time, but I think this was a horrible curatorial decision. Apparently they thought that because all of the paintings were of a single figure that was enough of a common thread to hang them in a cluster like this, but because it's work covering a 25 year stretch, the stylistic changes that take place made it look almost like a group show. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of salon style hangings anyway, but in this case I though it was particularly bad, and undermined the integrity of the individual images.

The third floor was better, but there were only three rooms. Two consisting of paintings of figures. Some heads, and some bodies. Sometimes single figures, and sometimes multiple. Some excellent. Some not so hot. The wall text was pretty pretentious, and I was about to blame the museum. Then I noticed there were a lot of quotes from the artist. Ouch! So, he paints better than he talks. I got to say the New Museum is a great building, but they have this habit of putting on retrospectives were the work is displayed out of chronological sequence, which I think is a bad Idea. They're doing the same thing with the Linda Benglis show downstairs, and I don't think it works there either. But, that's a different story. It kind of defeats the purpose of a retrospective if you're not going to follow the development of the artists oeuvre. I mean it's an interesting experiment, but I think the time has come to admit the experiment has failed. No?

The last room was of large multi-figure compositions dating from 1985 to the present. It is by far the most abstract, spontaneous, and I think best work in the show. The clearest references I could see were to Miro, and Arshile Gorky, with maybe a little Cy Twombly thrown in. These paintings are playful, and scary, and silly all at the same time. That's where Condo is at his best. It's his mix of sophistication and childishness that keeps the work fresh. He has the knowledge of a learned art historian, but maintains the playful enthusiasm of a 6 year old boy drawing with crayons. Personally, I'd like to see a better survey of his career than this.

MOMA, 11 West 53 street, Picasso:Guitars, 1912-1914. Through June 6th

In 1912, while in his late cubist phase, and still collaborating with George Braque, Pablo Picasso constructed a guitar out of cardboard, paper and string. Obviously it wasn't a functional guitar. Clearly it wasn't a painting (there was no paint involved). It didn't seem to be a sculpture, because of its frail materials, and because it hung on the wall in relatively low relief. It wasn't really a drawing or a collage either, because it didn't lay flat. Although, it clearly developed as an extension of collage. It obviously grew out of cubist sensibilities, but the materials were so cheap and junky looking, and it was thrown together in such a spontaneous, almost careless way that it doesn't at first look like a serious work of art. It certainly didn't look like it at the time. It takes a minute to get past the materials before you can appreciate how structurally imaginative and graceful it is.

What results over the next two years is a pretty sizable body of paintings, drawings, and collages based on the guitar form. Sometimes the subject is specifically a guitar. Sometimes it's some thing else that's clearly influenced by the structure of the guitar. He would break up, and reconfigure the different parts in the cubist manner he and Braque had invented. The one thing all the work in the show has in common is its fearless disregard for convention. When I say convention I'm not just talking about formal convention. Everyone knows what a rebel Picasso was in that department. I'm talking about materials and classifications of art forms. He would mix a charcoal drawing in with a painting. Sometimes he would combine newsprint, wallpaper and cardboard into a drawing, or mix grit (whatever that is) in with his paint. This makes it very difficult to distinguish one medium from another. The general perception is that this was groundbreaking because he was mixing real world elements in with the illusinistic space of the image. This flattened out the surface and drew attention to the picture plane, and subsequently the artifice of the image. The silhouette of a bottle in a still life or the shadow on a mans face is really a clipping from a newspaper. Another thing real world materials have though, is real world references. Contrasting cardboard with wall paper, or a newspaper article with sheet music turns an image into a dumping ground for cultural detritus. Did I mention that this was 1912, not 1985. Not Pop art, not post modernism, early modernism.

In 1914 Picasso reconstructed his first cardboard guitar with sheet metal to make a more archival version. That is also in the show. Personally I prefer the cardboard one. I also prefer the drawings to the paintings. They're more fragile, more spontaneous. They seem more about thinking through problems than making precious objects. Why is art that's made to last more valued than art that deteriorates with time. You'd think it would be the other way around. There's also something less serious looking about the drawings, which reveal a side of Picasso most people don't think of. The artist as playful intimatist. In one of the wall texts it mentions that André Breton was strongly influenced by these works. It's hard to think of Picasso as a surrealist, although his liberal use of the readymade and his blatant disregard for conventional aesthetics may indicate an influence on the dadaists. The single most pressing question I had leaving the exhibit with was why the guitar? Why not the clarinet?

James Cohan Gallery, Roxy Paine: Distillation, Through Dec 11

Roxy Paine is a sculptor with installationist sensibilities. Some would call him (that's right "him") an installation artist with sculptural sensibilities, but they would be wrong, and if they have a problem with that, they can talk to me about it. A lot of people know him from the piece he had on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum about a year ago. I, unfortunately missed that, but this is in the same "Dendroid" series as the Met piece. "Distillation" is one continuous, sprawling, stainless steel sculpture, branching from the front door of the gallery all the way into the back storage room. It starts by the front desk with a large tank that looks like a water heater, which then connects to a big glass beaker in the next room, filled with some powdery yellow substance. From there it grows into a wild twisting metal form that in some places literally runs right through the walls and floor of the gallery. In some ways it looks like a giant water pressure or ventilation system, with all the valves and tanks, and meters placed at various points.  In another way it looks kind of like an enlarged metal cast of some creatures circulatory system, with what appear to be hearts placed in various thick tangled sections. It also looks like a tree lying on its side with gnarled serpentine branches and twigs reaching across the room. In one case a group of mushroom heads sprout from an extension. But, in other areas it's hard to tell if we're looking at branches or veins, or synapses. Is this monstrosity animal, vegetable, or mechanical?

In an adjacent room a wall is covered with very delicate mushrooms, and other strange wormy fungal forms, laid out in kind of a loose spiral shape. They appear to be actually growing out of the wall. It's paradoxically repellant and quite beautiful in a tactile sort of way. I'm assuming this is a separate piece, and it would be pretty interesting on its own. It's soft porous material compliments the hard steel surface of "Distilation", but it pales in comparison to the giant piece that takes up about 80% of the gallery.

The first association I made from this huge steel structure was to John Chamberlain, I guess I was responding to the twisted metal and the organic/mechanical highbred aesthetic. But, the more I thought about it I realized that , at least aesthetically the art historical president for this kind of twisting mass of a work that reaches from one room to the next dates back to the high Renaissance and the Sistine Chapel. I know that sounds like a stretch, but indulge me on this. The roots, and soul of this kind of work can be found directly starting with the era of Michelangelo, leading up through the Baroque, and culminating in late Rococo sculpture and tapestries much more so than with anything post minimalist. It's just the materials that point to late, and post modernism. Frank Stella has shown similar sensibilities in his recent work, but that's a different story. The reason I'm focusing on this aesthetic is that it's a direct reflection of the content of the work (as any good art is). What looks at first like organic machinery transforms into a kind of industrial alchemy. Paine is identifying with the long tradition of the artists role as sorcerer or magician. The title of the piece is "Distillation", and you start to wonder what it is that's being distilled, and where can I get some.

Tom Nozkowski, at the Pace Gallery, Through December 4th

I'm not sure when the Pace Gallery took over this location, but thank god they did. It's a big beautiful space in a prime area, and the previous owners (I don't remember their name) put on some of the crappiest shows I've seen in Chelsea. It was frustrating to see what a waste of good resources that was. I don't know what they were thinking, or how they could afford such a great space when they were so clearly unqualified, but I guess it's just proof that you can't buy taste or talent, try as they did. Anyway, I guess their gone, so on to the show.

Tom Nozkowski is an unusual nonrepresentational painter, and a veteran of the genre. When I say unusual, I don't mean that his style of painting is without precedent. It's not. In fact he's obviously very aware of the tradition he's taking part in. It's just that the tradition is usually more closely aligned with representational than nonrepresentational painting. There is a school of early 20th century American abstract painting that he seems to be referencing. It's the school that artists like Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and Patrick Henry Bruce were members of. But, he's taking that tradition in a different direction. The reasons his work is unusual when compared to more modern abstract painting are several. For one, his scale is modest (all paintings in the show are 22"x28"), not tiny or precious in size, but pretty much standard easel painting dimensions. This runs contrary to the traditions of monumental, arena like painting established by the abstract expressionists 60 some years ago. Also, unlike most nonrepresentational painting Nozkowski doesn't make the physicality or the application of the paint an issue. There are some shifts in transparency and opacity of the pigment, but it's subtle. Equally subtle are the shifts between symmetry and asymmetry, and soft and hard edge forms. The work also varies from quite beautiful to downright ugly. But, I don't think aesthetics are high on his list of priorities. More interestingly though, there's something about the way he paints that looks like he's working representational, or maybe metaphorically (if that makes any sense). He has a certain vocabulary of forms, and while he's clearly working intuitively, or non objectively, there's something about them that feels rendered, as opposed to being the product of some spontaneous painterly event. Part of that may come from the way that the forms are cropped, or the fairly clear cut figure ground relationship that seem to also reference the use of composition with figurative images. other figurative characteristics are the occasional horizon lines, or shadow like shapes that rest at an angle below brighter more pronounced forms. It's all a way of embracing certain traditions in order to react against others.

What makes this different from other Nozkowski shows is that next to each painting is a smaller, framed drawing (all 8"x 10") that are all clearly related to the painting beside them. The presumption is then that they are preparatory studies for the paintings. This would be incorrect. In fact they are made after the painting is finished, and are used, as Nozkowski puts it, as "cool down exercises". Nozkowski, in the tradition of most nonobjective abstract painters, never believed in preparatory drawing, fearing that it would limit or stifle the progress of the painting. To the best of my knowledge, the tradition of artists making drawings from their own completed paintings is small, but not unheard of.   I know Corot did it, and so did Van Gogh. There may be others I'm not aware of, but I've never before heard of the practice used as a "cool down exercise".  It's very challenging to tradition, and it makes me think about the role, identity and possibilities of drawing as related to painting. These are pretty bold, and heady objectives for such seemingly humble work.   Clearly brains and balls work well together.

Heat Waves In a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, through Oct 17

At Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 17

Charles Burchfield is one of these artists I feel like I could go on about forever. I always thought of him as an American Vincent Van Gogh. That is, if Van Gogh were born in America 30 some years later, and didn't self distruct in his mid thirties he might have painted like Charles Burchfield. They both had the same kind of simplified emotionally expressive way of rendering imagery, and they both had the same enthusiastically spontaneous handling of the medium. They also both shared a near religious attraction to, and interpretation of nature. In fact, if Burchfield wasn't so schooled and sophisticated in his technique he would probably be considered an outsider, or visionary artist. There is something about Burchfield though that does seem distinctly American, and unmistakably tied to a specifically American kind of landscape painting. He had both the hands-on intimacy of a Marsden Hartley and an Arthur Dove, but the theatrical grandeur of the Hudson River School. This is one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure, that he can fit into many schools and movements , but maintained a very individual vision. Also, the fact that he managed to be both very accessible and fiercely ambitious. While he chose to work primarily with the unforgiving medium of watercolor for most of his life there are a couple of wonderful oil paintings in the show.

Oddly enough the show is curated by Robert Gober, who's known as a rather eccentric conceptual artist, and who's work deals mainly with psychological and emotional issues. This seemingly unlikely pairing makes much more sense as you learn more about Burchfield. Throughout most of his life he was plagued by a great deal of underlying fears and anxieties that seemed to fuel his work. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the content of his art is really the relationship between his inner and outer worlds, and his attempt to reconcile the two. This is evidenced in the first gallery where we see his semiabstract pencil drawings that are based on forms found in nature. They're the kind of thing Georgia O'Keefe would have done if she had his talent and vision.

Burchfield went through an extremely prolific period between 1916-1918, where he created a huge number of watercolors that I can only describe as explosively spontaneous. They display sincere emotional attempts to connect childhood memories to images in the natural world. In these watercolors you can see the influence of eastern art with his use of black calligraphic brushstrokes; something that you can find continuing throughout his later work. The thing that impressed me most about this body of work is that his technical virtuosity does not compromise the expressionism of the subject matter, and the expressionism does not compromise the abstract integrity of the image. Not an easy trick.

In the 20s Burchfield got married and had a bunch of kids, so he didn't paint as much, but worked as a designer, primarily of wallpaper. One of his wallpaper designs covers the walls of one of the galleries. As wallpaper goes it seems a little too aggressive to me, but maybe that's because he was a better painter than a designer. Then again what do I know about wall paper. Next there's a room filled with small spontaneous drawings or "doodles" that are so wildly imaginative that they look like they could have been done by Arshile Gorky.

Later, in the 1930's and 40s Burchfield achieved a great deal of commercial success, mainly with his images of factories, houses, and small towns. They were used for a great number of magazine covers, and greeting cards. Yet, in spite of this recognition he continued to be haunted by doubts and personal demons that I think helped infuse the work with certain urgency and anxiety. You can see this in the character of the buildings and trees depicted. It also saved the work from ever settling into charm or complacency. Also, while the images of streets and buildings that he was most known for have a Hopper-meets-Van Gogh quality to them, in the way that they capture the personality of the subject matter, it's when he walks into the forest that his true passion comes out. This ambition also led him to some radical technical innovations. With his expansion drawings he would attach sheets of paper to the sides of a previously existing watercolor and branch the image out , making the painting larger and further complicating the composition. This very effective means can first be seen in his nearly hallucinogenic "The Sphinx and The Milky Way" (1946).

His last work from the 1950s and 60s is his best, which is unusual in most artists. Apparently his health was lousy, but you'd never know it from the paintings. They're his largest and boldest, and are painted with a near religious fervor. They seem to be a culmination of everything he'd done up to that point and were driven by a mystical kind of confidence and urgency. Burchfield kept a journal throughout his life, and the curator has placed quotes from it next to most of the paintings in the show. Some of them apply specifically to the paintings they're next to and some don't, but they all refer to the natural world, and his relationship to it. To me they sound like they could have been written by Thoreau or Emerson for that matter, which is very revealing. Burchfield is already considered one of the great American landscape painters, but he would best be defined as a transcendentalist.

Masterpieces of European Painting from Dulwich Picture Gallery, through May 30th

At the Frick Museum 1 East 70th Street

Apparently the Dulwich Picture Gallery has been open to the public since 1817, which makes it England's oldest public art gallery. I've never been there, but if this show is any indication, it must house a lot of old European paintings.   This show, while very small has some beautiful paintings in it.  It starts with Rembrandts "A Girl At A Window" (1645) displayed prominently on a wall by itself. I feel like I've only seen this image in reproduction, but in person it's quite stunning.  Rembrandt's work tends to be like that.   Behind it is an amazing Poussin "Nature of Jupiter" (1663), which I think may be the best piece in the show.  Like I said it's a really small show, but it has some other big names like Watteau, Canaletto, and Gainsborough.

The tiny scale of the show feels like it's not really worth the price of admission, but it is a good excuse to go to the Frick, which has been called everyone's favorite museum. It is a beautiful building, that creates a warm serene environment, which runs contrary to the cold white modernist walls you see in most museums today (at least in New York). This is really an ideal venue for the collection, which consists of European fine and decorative art from the early Renaissance up through Impressionism.  Every once and a while I run into a New Yorker who's never been to the Frick and it's all I can do to keep from slapping them in the head. I always make a point of wandering into the Fragonard room and the Boucher room. Both elaboratly decorated spaces where the museum has recreated this lush rococo world of 18th century decadents and whimsy.  I think they're two of the most beautiful public rooms in all of New York.  Every time I go there I feel like if my eyes could salivate, this is where it would happen.  It's a wonderfully escapist experience.  Then you have to leave, and deal with the real world. That part sucks!

Walton Ford: new work, Nov12-Dec 23

Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 10th ave

I think Walton Ford is a pretty interesting artist. This is the second show of his I've seen at the Kasmin Gallery, and the work may not be for everyone, but it's definitely memorable. Ford makes large highly detailed watercolor and ink paintings on paper. There are only 6 works in the show, but because of their size and their nuanced intricacy any more would be overkill. I hesitate a little in calling them paintings, because they clearly reference natural history and wildlife illustrations, like those of John James Audubon. He even uses the same kind of captions describing the animals and events in the margins around the images used in those wildlife illustrations, complete with (I assume) fictional dates. Ford's art is, however much more violent and nightmarish in subject matter than the work he's referencing. He appears to be trying to expand this tradition of painting to include human fears and fantasies of the natural world.

What is most immediately engaging about the work is the contrast between Ford's meticulous, virtuosic rendering, and the horrific and absurdist nature of the things being rendered. As a painter I can't help but be drawn to how Ford has mastered a certain genre of cool scientific illustration, and distorted it in such a way that he can apply it to this fantastically disturbing world where animals are tearing each other and in some cases humans apart. In "The Island" a huge pile of wolf like thylacines sink into the ocean, while devouring dozens of sheep. In another image two bengal tigers attack a lion in what turns into a bloody massacre. In some cases the animals appear prepared to commit suicide. A guerilla stands at the foot of a dead hunter holding his twisted rifle at its own head. Is it trying to blow its brains out, or just playing with a new toy? A baboon looks prepared to hang itself next to a rather stylish outdoor breakfast table. Or, is it auto erotic asphyxiation? As best I can tell, the content of Ford's work is the relationship between human culture and animal nature. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Watteau: music and theater. through Nov 29 Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid through Nov 29

Metropolitan Museum of Art

For me Watteau seems like the kind of artist that's hard to not like. Maybe it's because I've been kind of obsessed with him for the last year or two, but this exhibition is to honor former director Philippe de Montebello, who called Watteau one of his favorite artists. So, apparently I'm not the only one. Watteau has a reputation as the master of sophisticated hedonism. I didn't make that up. I know I read that somewhere, and it seems pretty accurate. Toulouse-Lautrec may have been more of a hedonist, but Wateau was more sophisticated. I'm talking about the painting, not necessarily the subject matter. Watteau's subjects just look like they had more money than Toulouse-Lautrec's.

Anyway, this is a pretty small show that consists of just two rooms. One of drawings, and the other of paintings. Still, there are some real jewels to be found. Also, about a third of the work is not by Watteau but his contemporaries. This is to illustrate the artists influence on 18th century france, but it also draws attention to the qualitative difference between the work of some very skilled artists and that of an old master. The only artist who comes close to Watteau is Nicolas Lancret, who has some pretty impressive work in the show.

Watteau died very young at 37 which accounts for his somewhat small body of paintings, but he was a copious draftsman. Thank god for that, because he was magic with the colored chalk. Most of his drawings were done as studies for his paintings, but his light handed effortless way of rendering makes them stand out from his contemporaries, and function as independent works of art. His paintings also have a subtle elegance that makes them exceptional. He's as famous for his pallet of silvery greens and soft pinks as for his strange theatrical narratives. The interaction of his figures are enigmatic and appear almost otherworldly. These scenarios and the characters that make them up were based on the commedia dell'arte for which Watteau had once worked as a set and costume designer, and figures like Harlequin, Mezzetin, and Pierrot are staples in his work. He used these figures, and narratives to create a new genre of painting called the Fete Galante, which became very popular throuout Europe after his death in 1721.

Vermeer died soon before Watteau was born, which is just as well because I don't think they would have gotten along with each other anyway. Although, they did have a few things in common. They both died young (Vermeer at 45 and Watteau at 37). They both painted relatively small paintings with kind of dreamy ethereal narratives, and they both became hugely influential after their death. Watteau's painterliness, and exoticism though is in stark contrast to Vermeer's precise detailed studies of light and form, and his focus on humble everyday people and objects.

This show is similar though, in that it's small and made up largely of other artists work. Actually, in this case most of the work is by other artists and there are only 6 Vermeer's in the whole show including "The Milkmaid" which is on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. that's not too bad though considering that there are only about 35 Vermeer's known to exist in the world. All the other work in the show is part of the Met's permanent collection including the five other Vermeer's, which can be seen on exhibition all the time anyway. The show was put together to celebrate the anniversary of Henry Hudson doing something important. I can't remember what. Anyway, "The Milkmaid" is a beautiful painting, but I don't think it's his best. I don't think it's as good as "The Girl With A Pearl Earring", and it's certainly not as good as "View of Delft", but neither one of those are in the show.

Both these shows are closing pretty soon, so if you want to see them you've got to get off your ass and get over there. I probably should have reviewed them earlier, but you know I've got things to do.

Kandinsky. through Jan 13 @ Guggenheim

Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th ave (at 89th street)

Hey, if you like early 20th century abstract, Russian, avant-guard painting (and who doesn't) then Vasily Kandinsky is your kind of guy. If for some reason you don't, then you should, because he's an enormously important, ambitious and influential figure in the history of modernism. In fact, no study of modern art, no matter how cursory could be complete without including his work. He's probably one of the 4 or 5 most important artists of the 20th century, and he's credited with creating the first abstract painting. Although, that's a little hard to determine, since abstraction is something that happens in degrees, and with Kandinsky it happened very gradually, and over a very long period of time. So, it's kind of like how abstract does it have to be before it's abstract. Know what I mean?

He didn't actually start studying art in earnest until 1896 when he was 30 years old. His two major inspiration were Monet's "Haystacks" paintings where he felt he was more moved by the colors and forms than the subject matter, and a Wagner concert he attended. He came to believe that visual art should operate like music and be expressive in a pure autonomous form, thus laying the groundwork for abstract art. Solomon Gugganheim started collecting his work in 1929 on the advisement of artist/baroness Hilla Rebay who convinced him of Kandinskys importance. In 1943 when the museum opened it was originally called The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and Kandinsky was presented as the leading figure of the new art. The upshot of all this is that the Gugganheim has a lot of Kandinsky's, and this is one big ass show.

Kandinsky was a Russian artist who spent most of his life in Germany, and whose strongest influence came from the French. Which I guess makes him multicultural in an exclusively european kind of way. You can see the impact the impressionists had on his early landscapes and cityscapes, where the colors are rich and the forms simplified. He became a leading figure in the Russian avant-garde, and worked with composer Arnold Schonberg who was similarly experimenting with music, trying to give it a freer form of expression. In 1912 he started the "Blue Rider" movement, whos goal it was to express the power of color and form independently. The movement is strongly motivated by Kandinskys interest in mysticism and Theosophy. It's interesting to me that his work from this period still include some form of figurative imagery, which seem romantic and symbolist in nature. When there isn't a clear figurative subject there's a figurative depiction of forms, and some kind of an illusionistic space. There's one particularly beautiful little painting from the end of this period called "Moscow 1" that I'd never seen before. It was also around this time that he published "On The Spiritual in Art" (1912). Which, with his second book "Point and Line to Plane" (1926) are considered two of the most seminal written works on modern art. Having read Kandinskys books I have to say that I find his writing very dry and cerebral. It's basically essays about theory and cold annalysis of form. It seems to have very little to do with his paintings which are dynamic and improvisatory, and seem playful and even impulsive in structure. It's amazing to me that the writer and the painter could be the same person.

He moved from Germany to Moscow in 1917. During this time he internalized some of the teachings of the Russian constructivists and the Suprematists. This caused his paintings to become flatter, less figurative, and more geometric in structure. He developed a vocabulary of abstract forms, and he seems to have realized that he can create pictorial tension by simply contrasting these forms and not having to revert to conventional pictorial space. His drawing, however remains specific and he maintains a clear figure ground relationship, which today would be considered inconsistent with non-objectivity. (Speaking of drawing, there's a large gallery of Kandinskys works on paper which are kind of disappointing. They're very tight and finished looking, and seem to lack the spontaneity and energy of the paintings. I don't really know why.)

Kandinsky then moved back to Germany, and taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 to1933 when it was closed by the nazis. Then he moved to Paris, which in retrospect was a wise choice. While he was there the influence of the Surrealists becomes visible and these strange ameba forms enter his work. He planned to eventually return to Germany, but after his paintings were labeled degenerate and removed from German museums he decided to stay in France. Another wise choice.

The work from the last decade or so of his life is very beautiful, but a little complacent and kind of formulaic compared to the rest of his oeuvre. He seems to lose interest in the paint, and I think if he were making them today he would probably do it on a computer. Personally I think he was kind of running out of steam, which I guess had to happen eventually. Even this late work though doesn't seem to get bogged down in theory. That's the thing that impressed me the most about this show. Kandinsky is considered an important figure because of his revolutionary ideas. Today those ideas may not seem that revolutionary, but the consistent high quality of the paintings, that don't simply illustrate his ideas, is something that would make them stand up in any era. Maybe that's why he's such a modern giant. He didn't just have great ideas he was a great painter.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. through Jan 17

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945Madison ave

Georgia O'Keeffe is primarily known as a figurative artist, but this show concentrates on her early work (1916-mid 1930s) when she made her name as one of Americas early abstractionists. The show starts with some early charcoal drawings, and some encouragingly messy watercolors that she exhibited in 1916 at "Gallery 291", a visionary art space that was run by the visionary photographer Alfred Stiegletz. He would become a major figure in both her personal and professional life. She would become a subject in his photos both nude and clothed, which clearly helped promote the sensual and erotic aspects of her paintings. It also promoted the commercial success of both her and Stiegletz's art.

It's interesting to me that her work was seen as so groundbreaking when it's not really all that abstract, even by the standards of the time. She usually used some clearly identifiable figurative subject matter, and always had some kind of illusionistic space with modeled forms that you can see light fall on, pass through, or reflect off of. Maybe this noncommittal approach to abstraction made her work more accessible, and gave abstract painting a broader audience. But, compared to some of the radical abstraction that was going on at the same time in Europe by artists like Wassily Kandinsky Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian these paintings seem very tame. Admittedly she was dealing with different issues than they were. Her paintings are about abstracting from nature to give a truer, more emotional experience of being in the landscape than can be reached through conventional depiction. She wanted to capture a feeling, rather than make a picture. It's an ambitious goal, but some of her colleagues here in America who were working towards the same goal like Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove were clearly doing so with more ambition, and explored the genre in much more depth . Compared to their paintings hers look timid and illustrative. Even John Marin, who would never call himself an abstract painter seems much more raw and visceral in his handling of the landscape than she. The same could be said of Charles Burchfield, or Milton Avery for that matter (although Avery painted later). You can see the influence some of these artists had in her work in terms of pallet and structure, but she seems much less committed in her soft, almost apologetic brushstrokes.

O'Keefe was a very evocative colorist, and her paintings are best when she allowed the color to carry the strength of the painting, drawing attention away from her pictorially stagnant compositions, that for all their weird amorphous forms still look decorative and structurally flat. It made me wonder what would have happened if she had moved more earnestly into abstraction, and allowed the paint to simply be seen as paint. Maybe she would have turned into an interesting colorfield painter. Instead she went in the other direction and retreated back into figurative imagery. Surprisingly in the last room of the show we flash forward to 1952 where there are two paintings, "My Last Door", and "Black Door with Red" which are flat and geometric, and the most purely abstract paintings in the show. Maybe she was exploring what could have been. I overheard a couple of young women talking about how"fearless and intense" she was. It sounded like wishful thinking to me, but of course they were looking at one of Stiegletz photos of her at the time.

So, why is she considered such an important artist? Well, some people love her. Some of that has to do with the accessibility issue I brought up before. Also, clearly a lot of it has to do with Stiegletz promotion of her paintings, and more specifically with his promotion of her as a female art icon, and her paintings as the true inner voice of women. She was the only woman around at the time painting like this (or at least the only one I'm aware of). But, does that make her work distinctly female in character? Is it because her abstractions of flowers and canyons look vaginal in structure? Maybe it's because her paintings are pretty, and her light ambivalent brushstrokes were seen as feminine at the time. Maybe they still are. How sad would that be?

Dorothy Iannone: Lioness. Through Oct 18

New Museum of Contemporary Art, 235 Bowery, at Prince street

Dorothy Iannone: Lioness. Through Oct 18

Dorothy Iannone has been producing provocative art that deals with sex and the body, and the societal taboos surrounding them since the early 60s. Her work has always been a first person narrative, and has focused largely on charting the artists personal sexual history. According to the wall text her work is strongly informed by Egyptian art, and Byzantine mosaics. Personally I see more of a folk influence, specifically in the deliberate crudeness of the figures and the way they're rendered. Howard Finster is the first name that comes to mind. Lannone first gained some notoriety in 1961 when she was arrested for attempting to bring a Henry Miller book into the country when the writers works were still banned. The book was confiscated, and the artist sued to have it returned to her. She won the case, which helped pave the way for the ban on Millers work to be lifted . Some years later in a group show she was forced to cover the depiction of genitals in one of her paintings, which caused an uproar from fellow artists, and earned her more publicity. Her former lover, the artist Dieter Roth gave her the moniker "Lioness" which she's used ever since.

With a build up like that I wish I could tell you she was a better artist. I, for one was very disappointed. This is a small show, particularly since it's supposed to be a retrospective of sorts, but it didn't leave me hungry for more. Part of the problem is that what was revolutionary and provocative in the 60s and 70s doesn't always hold up today, so the loaded subject matter kind of comes off as a juvenile attempt to shock the viewer. That wouldn't bother me so much if the work had a little more formal or aesthetic intrigue. although, some work is better than others. There's a narrative, graphic novel type series of drawings with text called "Icelandic Saga" (1975-83) which is the best piece in the show. Its small scale gives it a personal, humble quality that seems to compliment the subject matter. There are also a series of small wooden cutouts of celebrities and historical figures with their genitals hanging out (1966-67) that have a perverse folksy charm. But, then there are these large scale paintings that really don't work at all on a formal or expressive level. The images look pretentious and ugly, and badly painted. I wish I could say that she is rebelling against conventional aesthetics, but I think it's just that she's a really bad painter. There's also this video piece which is one of the dumbest, most inelegant works of art I've seen in a while. I don't want to waste any time or space describing it.

I've heard that Ms Iannone is having a concurrent show at the Anton Kern Gallery on west 20th street. Maybe it's better than this one. I don't know, because I'm not going to see it. If anyone does, let me know.

Francis Bacon, A Centenary Retrospective. Through Aug. 16th

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Bacon, Through August 16, 2009

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is unquestionably one of the most important and influential British figurative painters of the twentieth century. He is also no relation to the actor Kevin Bacon, or to the smoked breakfast meat that I think tastes so good with french toast. But, I digress. When you think about the way British painters have distorted the human body since the first world war for the purpose of finding a truer less romanticized existential image of the human condition (and I'm thinking specifically of Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and more recently Jenny Saville) Bacon stands chronologically at the head of the pack. You could say that he established a content that would become one of the hallmarks of modern British painting. Another thing that makes him an historically important artist is that he was one of the first to cross reference photography, film, and old master paintings in his work. Also, he did it in a particularly imaginative and original way. His obsession with stills from the film "Battleship Potemkin" and the Diego Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X are themes that reappear throughout his life's work. We know Bacon was an atheist, but I don't know what it was about this image of this Pope that haunted him the way it did. Anyway, I can't imagine the Vatican was one of his major patrons.

That said, I have to admit that I've never been a huge fan of Bacon, and this show didn't do anything to change my mind. The show can best be described as hit and miss, but that can also accurately describe the mans career. Bacons images are arresting and powerful at best, but melodramatic and formulaic at worst. Also, his work didn't really evolve all that much. The paintings in the last galleries of the retrospective look very similar to those in the first both in subject and style. He clearly had a great gift for painterly distortion of the figure, but he frequently resorted to what I would have to call cheap expressionist theatrics, and it's the repetition of those theatrics that undermine their own authenticity. This is more obvious when his paintings are seen in a large group like this. In terms of subject matter he stuck primarily to figures in rooms, usually naked and lying on sofas or beds. There are also a lot of screaming heads, frequently belonging to the Velazquez Pope. Formally you can see the same pallet throuout the show. The same spooky burnt oranges and pinks, and the same big black backgrounds for his pale white figures to sit dramatically against. He also enjoyed drawing linear squares or rectangles around his figures which I guess was meant as a nod to the surrealists, and his use of little red arrows that crop up in his paintings over the last twenty years or so of his life is a pretty superficial compositional device that doesn't serve any intelligent pictoral function, and really annoys me.

There are some undeniable masterpieces in the show. I'm thinking specifically of the "Three Studies for a Crucifixion" triptych done in 1944 and the second version painted in 1962. These are as powerful and disturbing as anything I've seen in modern art. In fact, the triptych format is something Bacon really shines at, and are the most consistently good work in the show. Some of his early figure study paintings are also wonderful, like "Figure in a Landscape" from 1945. Also, the portraits of his late lover George Dyer painted in the 1970s are very moving and emotional images. it's interesting how his obsession with certain lovers seem to mirror his obsession with certain photographs and paintings. When he was on, Bacon was clearly a modern master of great importance. The problem as I see it is that half the time he painted like a lesser, less motivated artist trying to imitate Frances Bacon.

Matt Jacobs at George Bills Gallery Photos

These are some pictures I took at the opening of Matt's current exhibition at the George Billis Gallery. It was a lot of fun and worth the visit. Maybe you were there. Enjoy, and I hope you get a chance to see the show.

Matt Jacobs at George Bills Gallery May 26th to June 27th

Our friend and contributing blogger, Matthew Jacobs, will be having and exhibition at the George Billis Gallery from May 26 to June 27th. The reception is on Thursday, May 28th and will be from 6 to 8PM. The gallery is located at 511 West 25th street.

What will be exhibited, I consider to be a major departure from his past work in that the human figure is represented. His new work, from what I have seen in my studio visits, I've found to be both exciting and provocative. For there is something dirty in the beauty of his new paintings. I can't tell you what is in his head but I do like what he is doing. I don't want to say more about what I feel because he is my friend and I would like you to see it in person. I will be at the opening. Maybe there, we will have the opportunity to share our impressions. It is well worth the visit. I hope to see you there.

Metropolitan Museum of Art,1000 5th ave at 82nd streetBonnard: late interiors. Through April 19

You've got to love Bonnard! How can anyone not love Bonnard? Well Picasso didn't, but that's just something else to love about Bonnard. They both grew out of the same modernist roots, but while Picasso was creating his own style that so many subsequent artists embraced Bonnard branched out in a totally different direction that even Picasso couldn't appreciate. He was, and to some extent still is one of the most misunderstood artist of the modern era. He's considered by most to be the last of the bourgeois lyricists, and it is easy to initially see his paintings as playful decorative exercises, even "piddling" ones as Picasso said. But, if you keep looking you see how spatially conflicting and structurally complicated his images are. Complicated but never detailed, and slow but never labored. He also liberated color from subject matter in a way so radical that he has to be seen as one of the early modernists that prefigured abstraction.

One of the ways that he separated form from subject matter is that he almost never painted from life. Instead he worked from small spontaneous pencil sketches that had very little detail. Some look almost like Cy Twombly doodles. These gave him very little information to work from, thus forcing the painting to take on a life of its own. Bonnard sketched religiously, and kept a daybook with him at all times making visual notes of the things he saw. Most of those things are pretty mundane, but you'd never know from the drawings. There are a series of these day books in the exhibition that are absolute jewels.

The show focuses on his late interiors, but there are a lot of still lifes to be seen. I suppose a still life technically is an interior unless it's set up outdoors, but...whatever. Anyway, I think it's interesting because these are the same galleries that held the Morandi show a few months ago. I couldn't help but think how different Bonnard's still lives are from Morandi's in terms of pallet, composition, and general paint handling. In some ways though they're strangely similar in their intimacy, and the way they ask the viewer to slow down and navigate through the groupings of commonplace objects.

It is, however the larger more complex interiors that are the most effective and powerful. The way he combines and renders complicated objects and spaces, and transforms them into rich strokes of paint, bringing them back up to the surfaces of these larger canvases is endlessly fascinating.  A still life on a table will be set next to a figure, next to a door leading to another room. Then there will be a window leading out to a terrace, which will in turn lead to a landscape. It's like he wanted to fit as many things into the painting as he possibly could for the sheer joy of painting them, and seeing how they play off one another. I noticed something about Bonnard a few years ago. The scale of his subject matter doesn't usually grow when he paints larger paintings. He just paints more things, like he's opening the lens of a camera to include more. So, it's not the scale but the structural complexity of the image that grows with the size of the painting.

One of the last paintings in the show is "Interior Dining Room" which was finished soon before the artists death. Bonnard never had any trepidation about using color combinations that were challenging to aesthetic convention, sometimes even garish or ugly. This late work is particularly ambitious in that sense. It's a near riot of color, more so than almost anything of his I've seen. That, combined with the severe distortion of the figures and objects in the painting show that the artist never grew complacent in his old age. This is a great show of an amazing painter. Anyway, that's what I think.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave at 82nd streetArt and Love in Renaissance Italy. through Feb 16

Metropolitan Museum of Art 5th Ave. at 82nd Street

Usually when you think about Renaissance Italian art you think about religious and mythological art, and more often than not art commissioned by the Catholic church. One of the things that's unusual about this show is that it consists solely of privately commissioned, primarily secular paintings and objects. There are a number of beautifully crafted wedding gifts and dowry objects from wealthy families, like jewelry and ceramics. There are also quite a few childbirth trays, which sound like something an obstetrician might use, but are actually wooden trays that have images painted on one or both sides and are used to commemorate a birth.

the paintings in the show are mostly portraits of couples on the eve or just after a wedding, or in some cases children, or parents and their children. The quality of these vary a bit, but there are some masterful works by big names like Lorenzo Lotto, Dominico Ghirlandaio, Bronzino, Georgione, Titian, and one amazing double portrait by Fillippo Lippi that may be the best thing in the show. There's also a strange and haunting painting of a woman from Loranzo Di Credi.

One gallery is dedicated to paintings commissioned to decorate the "camera" or bed chamber , which I guess was a common practice among rich horny people at the time. A lot of these works are not up to the same level as those in the rest of the show, but there is one Botticelli which is actually part of a larger series that's absolutely stunning.

A lot has been made of the erotic art in this show, but it's a relatively small part of the exhibition and fills only two rooms with prints and ceramics. It seemed to me a lot more comic than sensual, partly because most of the other works in the show uses images of flowers or fruit and vegetables as discreet symbols of fertility and sex, and it's pretty amusing to see in this section how those symbols are replaced with actual genitals. The other reason I thought it was funny is that "the renaissance" by definition is the rebirth of classical thought and culture, so you don't really think of crotch shots and giant dismembered penises. By today's standard these works are pretty tame though, so if you're looking for something Mapplethorpian you may be disappointed. Actually there are two wonderful Titian's in the last gallery that I thought were far more sensual than anything in the "erotic" section. These paintings seem somehow to magically turn paint into flesh through some wild libidinal alchemy. I'm not sure how he did it, but I guess that's why he's an old master.

MOMA/ Marlene Dumas Dec 14-Feb 16

While Ms Dumas has become quite well known in Europe and is seen as an important painter This is the first major US exhibit of the artists work. I'd heard a good deal about her and I've seen individual pieces in person and even more in reproduction, but I'd never seen an actual exhibition of her work before. After seeing room after room of her paintings and drawings I have to say I really don't get what all the fuss is about.

The curator decided to hang this show according to theme as opposed to chronology , which I usually think is a bad idea, but in this case the artists work has changed so little over the twenty-some years the show covers that it doesn't seem to make any difference. She has a very distinctive style, where she uses thin stains of paint complimented with thicker dry brush marks. She also likes to place pale white figures against dark black backgrounds, or dark black figures against white grounds. These are fairly unoriginal stylistic decisions she seems to have arrived at early on, and never deviated from.

The human figure is really the primary focus of her work, usually the female figure, but there are also a lot of babies and a few men (usually being tortured). There's also a lot of nudity, with a lot of violent and sexually charged images that can only be described as superficially expressive. Even more so are her titles. One example is a 1995 painting of a nude middle aged woman entitled "Magdalena (out of eggs out of business)". Like her paintings, it's not subtle but not very powerful or thought provoking either. Her compositions are oddly cramped and centralized, I guess to show the body as an unnaturally compressed or repressed entity. The faces are frequently flattened out, with mask like distortions. Her ink drawings are better because she doesn't have to deal with color (which isn't her strong suit), and the bodies become runny improvisational puddles of ink on the white paper.

The whole "body politics" issue and how it relates to painting is something that's been handled much better in the past. I'm reminded of Francisco Clement, or Francis Bacon, or even John Currin who are/were much better painters than Ms Dumas, and whose work isn't weighted down with all her tired feminist baggage.

If she were a 20 or 30 something year old artist having her first solo show I wouldn't be as critical of her work, but she isn't. I kept thinking as I walked through the galleries of the potential behind what she was doing. Maybe if she more directly addressed the history of how women and women's bodies have been depicted in painting, or if her depiction's of them were more original or idiosyncratic, or if there were some evocative narrative between the bodies then the work might be more interesting. These are issues she's going to have to deal with as an artist, but she's going to have to get past her complacency as a painter first.