Alien terrain at Storefront Ten Eyck

Guest contributor Peggy Cyphers / “New Narratives,” a large group show of recent representational painting at Storefront Ten Eyck, includes KK Kozik’s Orion’s Belt, an image of a traditional farmhouse, covered in snow and illuminated by a deliciously starry blue-black sky. Kozik is known for creating quasi-surreal scenarios, full of sardonic humor and mystical imagery. I first saw her paintings two decades ago at Bill Maynes in Soho and was struck by the range of subject matter – suspiciously silly groupings of objects, scenes and figures. Her stories, although often indecipherable, continue to verge on the mystical, stirring up peculiar childhood memories and nostalgia.

The Asymmetric Armory Show

Guest contributor Jonathan Stevenson / The Modern section of the Armory Show was like an unruly museum-quality exhibition, showcasing one anointed (and usually dead) artist after another, but in no particular order. If that dispensation fell short of framing the artists’ work as respectfully or systematically as some might have liked, it did make for a gratifying kind of treasure hunt.

After (or before) beholding a wall of Picasso etchings and prints or a couple of big Jim Dines (who got a lot of love this year), turn a corner and find a solitary little Morandi gem (pictured above), a brace of serene Lee Krasner gouaches and watercolors, a titanic Georg Baselitz, a Diebenkorn and a Frankenthaler on angled facades, an array of Imi Knoebels, a tandem of cool Lewitt aquatints, several opaque Milton Avery landscapes, Doves and Hartleys. Pause in the middle aisle and pick a vector, then point and walk to a pair of signature Stella paintings or a magnetically odd 1959 Alfred Leslie canvas that insists on perusal. The Modern section is such a pleasure, it's no wonder Frieze New York, which takes up residence on Randall's Island in May, has announced the introduction of "Spotlight," a section dedicated to work made in the 20th century. At "Spotlight" Frieze promises a series of solo shows that offer a "fresh look" at works by under-appreciated artists.

Starting with the Modern stuff, though, set up the Contemporary section to disappoint – at least as far as painting was concerned. This year – except, it seemed, for Alex Katz’s work – there was not much interesting painting. Conceptually overloaded work trying too hard to capture the world’s celebrated complexity crowded it out. Perhaps fittingly, most of those paintings that were on view seemed besieged, lurching between dispirited and desperate. The dearth of prepossessing painting, of course, also made it relatively easy to zone in on the paintings that were truly outstanding – another Baselitz, and enterprising but neatly contained work by artists like Mark Francis, Anne Nieukamp, and Janaina Tschape.

Painting is a prayer

Contributed by Katelynn Mills / One can never hide who they are in their work - I’ve always known and felt that painting is a direct extension of the artist’s soul. Be the individual a shallow, fabulous Warholian, or a deep and tortured Rothkoan, or anyone in between, a (wo)man’s capacity is marked by their expression. Painting is a meditative diffusion of the ego, which allows something outside the artist, something much greater, to enter. It’s a white-hot focus of energy that cannot afford distraction. But mostly what painting is, is a yearning for the impossible union of spirit and physical matter – an insatiable prayer. A union is to be had in the completion of a picture, a provisional answer to our prayer. A form which demands the viewer to believe the illusion and content. But because time will not afford us the solace of everlasting perfection, the artist is thrown right back into the search for meaning. In lustful agony, our Greek ancestor, Diogenes asked “would to heaven that it were enough to rub one’s stomach in order to allay one’s hunger?” No. As long as there are people, painting, in all its decadence, will serve as essential means to meaning and truth for those who desire. One such artist who can be noted by his passion in his spiritual quest is Bill Jensen.

He plays with the idea of indeterminacy by allowing marks from used cups of paint to stain his canvas in Message and shows evidence of human touch with his finger smudges which pull across he surface. Jensen’s black on black compositions, such as End of the Ordinary Realm, are highly sensitive pieces that say something about the immensity and intimacy of the human experience. The air in these dark paintings is thick, more like water – affecting an engulfing experience. One cannot help but feel alone yet surrounded in this piece.

Lost and found

Joan Nelson's delicate landscape paintings feature images that seem familiar: spindly trees, sparkling waterfalls, vivid blue skies. Indeed, for three decades she has borrowed details from the majestic landscapes of painters such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, and Edward Hicks. In this recent series of paintings, on view at Adams and Ollman through July 11, Nelson references an Oregon road trip she took several years ago. Inadvertently getting lost, Nelson found herself driving through the Columbia River Gorge, the rolling hills of Mount Hood, and the foothills of the Three Sisters mountain range. She was so taken by the views that she didn't turn back.

Her use of color and value (warm deep browns in the foreground, faint blue-green-purples in the background) afford the images a great sense of distance while the little plant or spit of land she mentions in the interview appear at the bottom of each painting to pull the viewer into the picture. Nelson is close to the land--she lives in upstate New York and walks everyday, making mental note of each plant that falls within her view. Her paintings convey that physical presence, in terms of both image and process. Much like old hand-painted postcards, they embody a personal memory and evoke a sense of nostalgia.

Albert Oehlen's genius

If paintings were guests at a dinner party, Albert Oehlen’s would be the most popular raconteurs. Everyone would clamor to sit next to them, leaving the rest of the paintings sulking at the end of the table by themselves. His current exhibition at the New Museum, “Home and Garden,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Natalie Bell, seems too intimate – I would have preferred a bigger party with twice as many guests. Nevertheless, the show is a tour de force, full of robust irony, dynamic observation, art-historical allusions, and painterly brio. One installation and twenty-seven canvases, spanning his 35-year career, embody manic duels of line, shape, color, texture, and image. The paintings don’t necessarily fit together in some larger plan; their impact and significance lies in the process each reveals, the energy it emits, and its unfettered wit.


At 60, Oehlen isn’t a worrier. For him painting isn’t about developing a distinctive style or thinking too deeply about a particular shape or line; to the contrary, it’s about creating something unexpected and taking painting somewhere new. He works with simple guidelines, such as “paint slower,” and then he teases them out, making choices based on that idea. "Originally my pictures were very impulsive...I used to think, the easiest thing is to paint fast, and the appropriate result will automatically follow," he told Jorg Heiser and Jan Verwoert in a 2003 Frieze Magazine interview. "Then it occurred to me: why not paint slowly? [laughs] It sounds awfully banal but it had a great many consequences."

 Walking through the New Museum exhibition, I imagined how he worked each canvas, patiently layering element after element, until something surprising happened. For all their flamboyance, Oehlen’s paintings are disciplined and authoritative. He knows when to quit and move on to a different canvas and address a new problem, or perhaps to approach the same problem from a different direction. He stops while the painting is still fresh, before it loses the force of spontaneity and becomes agonizingly chewed-over. 

Karla Wozniak at Gregory Lind

Karla Wozniak paints the American landscape, from fast food joints and strip malls to car dealerships and roadside scenery. While she was an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, elements from east Tennessee's verdant landscape began appearing in Wozniak's work. In vibrant newer paintings, on view in a solo show that opens at Gregory Lind on September 10, her focus turned decisively to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

Like Charles Burchfield, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Arthur Dove, the landscape provides a starting point for Wozniak's fervid imagination. Rendered in saturated, unnatural color, the landscape forms teem with pattern, tangled and energetic. For Wozniak, the natural world is a template into which she pours abundant emotional content.

Peter Saul at the Hall Art Foundation

Guest Contributor Joshua Sevits / The Hall Art Foundation in bucolic Reading, Vermont, is located in a faithfully restored stone farmhouse with three large barns, each of which has been turned into exhibition space. The barns now incongruously house a retrospective of Peter Saul's Day-Glo paintings of giant combustive genitalia, serpentine poop, and uncompromisingly violent characterizations of western civilization. This attentively organized exhibition spans fifty-three years and comprises thirty-seven works--ranging from meticulously nuanced compositions to crude political caricatures--that vividly reflect many of the painting sensibilities that prevail today. 

At his best, Saul is a bitterly sardonic painter who applies precise craft and the jaw-dropping use of color to intuitively arranged compositions. Above all, Saul is a driven storyteller whose work is never boring. A sense of frustration permeates Saul’s early paintings from the late fifties through the mid-sixties. These pieces were made before Saul discovered acrylic mediums and before he began addressing political and social issues--the American war machine, the systematic brutalization of women, victimization of minorities, the plight of poor and indigenous peoples, and the overall shallowness of everyday life. The small oil paintings reveal him as a young artist beginning just after the tumult of Abstract Expressionism. But while the works on paper may owe their seemingly haphazard mark-making to Gorky and de Kooning, Saul also developed a penchant for surreal representational and figurative imagery, often interjecting, in line with Pop Art innovations, something commercial or industrial: a hat, a cigarette, a glove, a submarine. This practice helped ground his work in the provocative social critique that distinguished the Chicago Imagist group with which he is closely associated.