Painting – Page 15 – longlistshort

NYC Art Shows- Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston at Petzel

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking

Apr 092025

“Brownfield”, 2023-2024, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

For Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston‘s exhibition Flash Point at Petzel they have created three series of works reacting to various environmental and political events. The large-scale brightly colored woodcut prints on fabric, three of which are pictured above, created for History is Present, are especially impressive.

From the gallery about all three series-

Their series of large-scale, multi-color woodcut prints on fabric, titled History is Present, considers the age of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human impact and shifting natural geographies. Referencing canonical artworks, Sidhu and Swainston lend iconic visual allegories to lasting social conditions and humanitarian issues; for example, their “Raft” depicts contemporary displaced peoples and a history of forced migrations. Made using a custom-built press to accommodate the scale of these works, these monumental woodcut prints demonstrate a mastery of technique and process, with layers of tonal values building complex compositions.

Their second series, War for the Union, features mixed woodcut with silkscreen prints on paper, looking toward distinctly American political issues from recent history. Layered with appropriated images from news media wood engravings of the civil war, such as Winslow Homer’s Civil War drawings for Harper’s Weekly, this series suggests both the cyclical temporality of images in American journalism and a collective fear of a second civil war in our current climate. War for the Union depicts scenes from pivotal moments of civil unrest, including demonstrations following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, the 2024 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally. Through rigorous, vibrant layers of figures, rally signs, and geographies, Sidhu and Swainston slow down the processing of mass circulated images, the antithesis to our current barrage of news media.

The third series, a group of color etchings made in collaboration with Columbia University Neiman Center for Print Studies titled Spring Wake, highlights environmental issues in various regions, rendering signposts of protest with native plants of the respective terrain. For example, “Japanese Lily” layers images of activists protesting the radioactive water released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, while “Fairy Primrose” depicts protests of the ecocide resulting from the ongoing Ukraine War—each indigenous flora overlaid atop the local environmental threat. Bearing an almost documentarian quality, these prints link political turmoil and climate disaster intimately with the depicted landscapes.

The exhibition title, Flash Point, defines not only the point of combustion, but also the instant at which a person or event flares up, suddenly exploding into action or being. Using woodcut printmaking, one of the oldest forms of mass communication and a means to propel revolutions, protests, and social movements, Sidhu and Swainston address structures of power and our relationship to hegemonic forces. The artists examine contemporary cultural conflicts through an unraveling of modern news media to reveal its canonical underpinnings, reaching back in time to consider how news images are represented, circulated, and consumed.

This show is closing on 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Lyne Lapointe at Jack Shainman Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 082025

“Hemisphere”, 2024, Wood, ink on paper, hemp, linen, glass beads and frame by the artist

“Corps Astral/ Astral Body”, 2024, Ink, gold leaf, and paper on wood in an artist frame

“In Vitro”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, linen, and blown glass eggs mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

“Okinawa”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, coral, and sand stars mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

Lyne Lapointe’s works for Becoming Animal, her exhibition of new work at Jack Shainman Gallery, natural and hand made materials add dimension to works focused on the body and its connection to the natural world.

From the gallery-

Inspired by a passage in A Thousand Plateaus, written by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the exhibition title recalls the attitude they describe as being essential to the creative process: ‘becoming animal,’ or, an ability to inhabit different material and ontological perspectives. This phrase philosophically expresses a consistent quality in Lapointe’s work, namely her ability to ‘embody’ her materials—whether it be ink or glass beads, coral or abandoned beehives—by allowing them to retain their own specificity while also fully incorporating them into the pictorial spaces of her figures. Just as Lapointe’s materials contribute to the transformation of her figures, so too do they undergo their own metamorphosis as they are integrated into the compositions, a process that reflects the body’s capacity to adapt and change while still retaining continuity with the past.

Over the past four decades Lapointe has created poetic and materially complex works that consider the corporeal and psychological consequences of existing in a world of uncertainty. Her site-specific installations and architectural interventions created throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in partnership with critic and artist Martha Fleming, established many of these essential thematic concerns. At their core was the role that social spaces play in creating and modifying subjectivity, an experience Lapointe has continued to dissect and explore through other media, including the paintings on paper in this exhibition. Together, they demonstrate her consistent focus on the body and its relationship to external factors, whether they be socially constructed or naturally occurring.

Through research, careful sourcing and sustainable practices, Lapointe has expanded her process to include heterogeneous materials and found objects alike. In Beehives Apiarists (2024), the diptych’s beehives have been affixed to the figures while propolis—a resin-like substance produced by bees and typically used for medicinal purposes—has been used to cover the works entirely. In Mother of Pearl (2024), a large shell has been placed at the center of the figure while pearls punctuate the background. In Vitro (2024) brings together blown glass eggshells, hemp and recycled linens. Lapointe’s method of collecting these items, locating additional materials and preserving their respective histories is a process that metaphorically expresses her long-standing desire to use resources that not only describe our world, but that remind us of its innate worth and beauty and thus of our own as well.

By incorporating objects found in nature and the home, Lapointe creates moments that reimagine the body and place it in a point of transition. At times between genders, while at others void of identity altogether, her figures always question the viability of personal expression in our current socio-political context. Though typically characterized by vulnerability and fragility, they also and just as often embody a position of triumphant resistance to a world that seeks to restrict gender expression, categorize sexuality and stigmatize ‘otherness.’ When responding to a world of danger and hostility her figures can don protective armor, as in Black Billed Cuckoo / Magnolia Grandiflora (2023) and Okinawa (2024). In the series The Head and the Body (2024) Lapointe renders each figure in both deep black ink and shimmering gold leaf, suggesting an inner psychological world that the materials merely hint at. This is a world where resilience and radiance take form as proffered by the gold leaf, while tenacity, seen in the deep opacity and outward reaching gesture of the inked figure, takes root.

Though Lapointe’s practice has often centered femininity and womanhood in its many personal and social forms, in Becoming Animal she has gone one step further by creating figures that appear genderless, or which seem to exist outside of such rigid codification entirely. The found objects she uses to characterize these anonymous forms also signify their environmental context and invite viewers to consider the works through the lens of environmentalism. By encouraging each figure to occupy multiple ontological perspectives at once, Lapointe creates both a literal and conceptual connection to the construction of the works themselves. They straddle the line between painting, sculpture and collage, while finding ways to express the body in a fugue state through her singular craftsmanship and mastery of materials—or as Deleuze and Guattari write, they seek to ‘un-human the human.’

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Delaware Art Shows- Create Magic Studios Pop-up in Wilmington

Art, Art Shows by Location, Delaware, Wilmington

Apr 042025

Create Magic Studios, made up of husband and wife team Todd and Allison Purse, has recently taken over local book store Huxley & Hiro‘s future home with a pop-up shop and gallery. The space is filled with artwork from local artists and Todd’s bright, colorful murals.

Along with making artwork and comics, Todd Purse also designs artwork for Brandywine Coffee Roasters, including their hand printed bags. In one of the rooms in the gallery several of them are on display.

Tonight, 4/4/25, is one of the last times to see the space and will be open from 5-8pm with live music from Danny and the Darlings.

It is also ArtLoop Wilmington, a monthly First Friday art walk with several venues around the city staying open late.

NYC Art Shows- Merlin James at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Apr 032025

“Untitled (Pier, Yellow), 2024-25 Acrylic on canvas

“Hobby Horse”, 2024-25, Mixed materials

“Untitled”, 1994-2008, Acrylic on canvas

“Not Titled”, 2024, Acrylic on canvas

Currently on view at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is Merlin James’s solo exhibition, Hobby Horse. The paintings and mixed media works explore the artist’s memories and often use repeating imagery. The exhibition includes James’s earlier work as well as his most current paintings.

From the gallery-

The exhibition title refers to a motif seen in several works, of a small child in a cowboy outfit, riding a hobby horse. Imagery in James’s work, while sometimes suggestive of personal associations or memories, often relates metaphorically to the nature of painting itself. In the classic 1951 essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse,’ E. H. Gombrich examines the way a child’s hobby horse “represents” or otherwise corresponds to a real horse, and uses the discussion to illuminate how illusion, abstraction, expression, meaning, and value all function in works of art. James explores similar concerns, and his hobby horse rider perhaps stands, in more ways than one, for the artist.

Another element appearing in several works throughout show is an elongated, centralized, vertical ovoid or mandorla shape, that has recurred in James’s paintings over many years. The artist describes the form as being neither abstract nor representational, and not symbolic, yet having for him an inexplicable reality and resonance.

Further features add to the complexity of James’s project: non-rectilinear formats with curved sides; unusual, artist-made picture frames; transparent gauzes that reveal the structure of the stretcher bars behind. In general, James does not distinguish between support and image.

James’s exhibitions often place new paintings alongside ones from past years, and the present show includes works dating from as far back as the early 1980s. While his art periodically introduces innovations, he considers all his work current and views the development of his oeuvre as cumulative and recursive rather than linear—a quality that parallels the condition of memory.

Certain recent paintings depict the Arnold Circus bandstand in East London, a location James first painted and drew around 1983 when he had a studio nearby. The bandstand’s polygonal structure, and enclosure by fences and flights of steps, evokes some of James’s other motifs such as piers, toll booths, bridges, and entranceways. These works again speak to an interest in the nature of artifice but also suggest more personal references or memories. In some paintings, figures approach each other or the viewer, while other scenes are marked by a palpable absence of any figures at all.

Hobby Horse overall reflects James’s characteristic diversity of subject: land, sky, and seascape; still life objects; nocturnal darkness and dazzling sunlight; glimpses through windows; apparent abstraction; explicit sex; intersecting rivers and roads; likenesses of individuals; and far horizons.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

NYC Art Shows- Sung Hwa Kim at Harper’s

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Apr 022025

Sung Hwa Kim‘s beautiful paintings for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring at Harper’s, celebrate the seasons with jars containing nature scenes and elements that glow.

From the gallery-

Throughout Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the traditional Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to study the passage of time. He refers to these paintings as visual haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that tend to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim uses color liberally: brilliant pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes wherein urban greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the night.

Works like Still Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated only by a crescent moon. But indoors, behind a vast window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Beyond the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the two worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a gentle glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted grey flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo across this ethereal work—the artist expertly stages diverging cycles of life and death.

Kim continues to explore existential proximities in Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, where time folds in on itself, and reality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral warmth over quiet rooftops—an ending and a beginning intertwined. Within an interior space, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in eternal bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A notebook and pencil await just outside of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.

Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal yet precisely rendered compositions, he captures the subtle transformations that flow between opposing forces. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting harmony. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to consider the perpetually converging realities that inform life. Through these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that define both the tangible world and the great expanse of the cosmos.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Shyama Golden at Harper’s

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Mar 282025

“Blood Orange Moon”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Daydream of a Nocturne”, 2023, Acrylic and oil on linen

The two paintings above are from In My Mind, Out My Mind, Shyama Golden’s exhibition at Harper’s last year. Golden, along with Narsiso Martinez was recently selected by LACMA to be the Art Here and Now (AHAN) Studio Artists of 2024.

From the Harper’s press release for Golden’s 2024 exhibition-

Across the paintings that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, Golden depicts universal cycles of rebirth as told through her personal biography and cultural memory. The artist derives inspiration from her neighboring Los Angeles landscapes and the figure of the yakka in Sri Lankan folklore, a demon or trickster spirit. Plummeting into the belly of the beast, Golden unravels her subconscious turmoil and is then reborn. In the biomythographical series, the artist transcends binaries of good and evil while meditating on the psychic, social, and ideological fissures that inform cyclical transformation.

Like a cinematic storyboard, each painting presents a different scene in Golden’s speculative odyssey. The narrative begins in the cemetery: eerie green hues resound, invoking the unsettling terrain where the living greet the dead. From there, Golden’s protagonist travels through gopher holes and subconscious highways where she collides with an imagined yakka and plunges into its wound. Golden’s avatar concludes her expedition at the Los Angeles River. Here, she emerges from a tree reborn, mirroring the river’s regenerative journey.

Repeatedly, Golden faces troubled interiority directly within this visual retelling of internal affliction. In works like Daydream of a Nocturne, which marks the beginning of the series, the artist’s fictional self sits beside a yakka alter ego among a ring of graves. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar presents an offering to the hybrid creature who bears a toothy grin: fish, served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and an all-American corn dog. These miscellaneous treats appease the yakka while gesturing towards diasporic hybridity.

In Blood Orange Moon, Golden represents herself after she’s ejected from a tree trunk following her expedition through psychological space. As if Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland, Golden’s protagonist shimmies out from the world of her inner demons and happens upon an optimistic landscape. This surreal work, like the rest that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, beckons a curiosity for the unfamiliar—a desire that dwells at the pith of the exhibition. Across these scenes, Golden invites the onlooker to be gentler with all that is flawed and foreign. It is these perplexing yet dynamic differences, within ourselves and among others, that make us human.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Indiana at Kasmin

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 272025

“LOVE”, 1967, Oil on canvas

“LIP”, 1960-1, Oil on canvas

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969, currently on view at Kasmin, presents a fascinating selection of the artist’s work from that decade. Several of his well known paintings like LOVE (pictured above) are included, but it is interesting to see his lesser known work as well as the progression in his work throughout this period.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

…Featuring 20 works drawn exclusively from the artist’s personal collection as endowed by Indiana to the Star of Hope Foundation, the exhibition includes an example from the artist’s first edition of LOVE sculptures, conceived in 1966 and executed between 1966—1968, and a vitrine display of archival materials including some of the artist’s journals. This exhibition marks Kasmin’s first collaboration with the Star of Hope Foundation, which was established by the artist in his lifetime, and the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of work by Indiana since 2003.

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969 chronicles the Minimalist origins of Indiana’s signature use of signs, symbols, words and numbers. Pairing canonical works with those rarely seen by the public, the exhibition provides a deeper understanding of Indiana as an artist whose output remains emblematic of American culture. The paintings on view demonstrate the personal iconography the artist ascribed to his artwork: as his peers withdrew from the aesthetics of self-expression, Indiana embarked on a career-defining inquiry into the power of symbols to represent meaning. Organized thematically, the exhibition charts Indiana’s influential depictions of words and numbers in bold colors through his early abstractions, reflections on his personal history and the stages of life, and the poetic inevitability of transcendence—a return to the source.

From the gallery about LOVE and LIP–

After discovering a trove of nineteenth-century packaging stencils in 1960, Indiana began incorporating words and numbers in his paintings, spearheading the adoption of commercial advertisement as a language of art. LIP (1960–61), an early example of a single word painting, features the title word’s yellow letters at the center of two intersecting orbs, whose contours suggestively form a pair of red lips. Unraveling the distinction between sign and symbol, the composition suggests a kiss, a universal bodily expression of love.

More selections and information from the gallery below-

“October Painting”, 1959-60, Oil on canvas

Indiana began this composition, which depicts the shadows of a dracaena plant, in October 1959. “This, I feel, is a very seminal painting,” he wrote in a journal entry the following December, seeking to distinguish his own visual language from artists Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly.

“Ra”, c.1961, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

After painting a series of orbs in 1959, Indiana revisited the theme in Ra (c. 1961), a triptych arranging a number of red, blue, and green circles in flattened pictorial space. This work’s title reflects Indiana’s early interest in mythology, referencing the Egyptian sun god Ra, historically depicted with a red solar orb and cobra over his head.

Circles appear in Indiana’s work as early as 1958 and resound through paintings such as Mother and Father (1963-66) and Hallelujah (Jesus Saves) (1969). The arrangement of orbs in Ra suggests Indiana’s fascination with sequences, an avenue he would explore in paintings of numbers including Cardinal Nine (1966), on view nearby.

“Cardinal 9”, 1966, Oil on canvas

Indiana’s Cardinal Numbers series (1966) depicts the numbers one through zero in red, blue, and green. Adopting the typography of a business calendar, Indiana conceived of each number to represent a stage of life. Cardinal Nine represents the near end of the sequence, just before zero. The palette held sentimental significance for Indiana, who recalled memories of the red and green signage of Phillips 66, the gas company where his father worked, against the open blue sky.

“Mother and Father”, 1963-1966, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

Indiana’s extraordinary diptych Mother and Father (1963-66) depicts the artist’s scantily dressed adoptive parents entering a Model T Ford within two circles, as if observed through a pair of binoculars. Conceived as the first to depict his parents in each of the four seasons, Indiana only realized one iteration of the series, set in the winter. Details of the vehicle’s license plate allude to Indiana’s conception ahead of his birth in September 1928, as if to mythologize the artist’s biography.

In an accompanying artist statement, Indiana described this painting as an essential part of his celebrated American Dream series (1961-2001), which earned Indiana’s first major recognition after early acquisitions by The Museum of Modern Art, Van Abbemuseum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and elsewhere.

Indiana exhibited this painting in an early state in 1964, later adding its stenciled lettering in 1966. He continued to exhibit the work extensively, including in the São Paulo Biennial in 1967 and his traveling institutional retrospectives of 1968, 1977, 1982, and 2013.

“August Is Memory Carmen”, 1963, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

The number 8 held special resonance for Indiana, whose mother, Carmen, was born in the month of August. August Is Memory Carmen
(1963) incorporates the title of a lyric poem Indiana wrote in 1953, four years after her death. Indiana depicted her portrait alongside his father, Earl, in Mother and Father (1963-66), installed nearby.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25. It is presented in dialogue with Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibition Robert Indiana: The American Dream, which will open May 9, 2025.

Flashback- Florida Art Shows- Rigaud Benoit at Tampa Museum of Art

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Tampa

Mar 212025

To celebrate the beginning of Spring, two paintings by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit– Fleurs du printemps (Spring Flowers),1965 and Les Oiseaux (The Birds), 1973.

The work was part of last year’s exhibition Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection at Tampa Museum of Art.

Sunday Energy- Joseph Ducreux at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Mar 092025

This painting, Self Portrait, Yawning created by 1783, is by French artist Joseph Ducreux and can be seen at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

From the museum about the work-

Joseph Ducreux experimented with the traditional limitations of the genre of self-portraiture by creating an expressive, humorous, and rather unorthodox image of himself stretching and yawning. Dressed informally in a turban and bright red jacket, Ducreux, in the midst of a huge yawn, opens his mouth wide, contorting his face with the effort and stretching his right arm toward the viewer. Holding this exaggerated pose, his back sways and his stomach pushes forward; his entire body presses up close to the surface of the picture.

Ducreux was interested in the study of physiognomy and frequently used his own features as a convenient means to observe various expressions. In fact, he executed dozens of similarly exaggerated self-portraits throughout his career. A contemporary critic admired this self-portrait for its warmth, color, and expression, but later critics complained about the repetition of the subject.

Delaware Art Shows- Howard Pyle at Delaware Art Museum

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Illustration, Painting / Painters

Mar 052025

Pictured are two paintings by artist and illustrator Howard Pyle, The Mermaid (1910) and The Flying Dutchman (1900), currently on view at Delaware Art Museum. Pyle played an important part in the history of the arts in Delaware, especially in Wilmington, where he was based. The Mermaid was his last painting. He passed away in Italy in 1911 and the painting was left unfinished on his easel. It was completed by his student Frank Schoonover.

From the museum about the artist-

Howard Pyle captivated American readers and aspiring illustrators with his passion for storytelling. Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle illustrated and wrote for the nation’s most popular magazines. His art breathed life into fictional villains and historical heroes. Pyle taught a generation of students including Violet Oakley, Frank Schoonover, and N. C. Wyeth. Today, illustrators, filmmakers, and animators still celebrate his lasting imprint on the nations visual culture.

Launching his illustration practice in the 1870s, Pyle built a successful career that spanned thirty years. He excelled throughout rapid industry expansion and vast changes in printing technology. Pyle published thousands of images in books and magazines. Beginning in 1905, Pyle transferred his skills as a storyteller into mural painting. When he died, his students and friends came together to preserve his extraordinary legacy. They formed the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, which became the Delaware Art Museum.

Howard Pyle was born on this day in (3/5) in 1853.

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