November 2006

posted 11/3/2006  DAVID COHEN on Brice Marden at the Museum of Modern Art
	The linear Mardens might seem more complex than the planar ones in terms of gesture and expression, but arguably they restore simplicity in the way they reconnect with intuition and bodily presence.

posted 11/19/2006  ERIC GELBER on Arturo Herrera at Sikkema Jenkins
	Herrera likes to play wallpaper or op-art patterns off of linear tangles, and his color combinations are boisterous and somewhat inchoate.

posted 11/1/2006  DAVID COHEN on Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein, Tom Burckhardt at Tibor de Nagy
	“Old age” style has usually to do with looseness, both in terms of medium application and the definition of forms. But these recent works by Elizabeth Murray stand out within her oeuvre thanks to sharp focus, crisp chroma and clarity of line.

posted 11/3/2006  JOE FYFE Report from Hanoi
	Tran Trung Tin is a self-taught Vietnamese artist who, after serving his country’s revolutionary army in its defeat of the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, attended Hanoi’s documentary film school and briefly became a film star. As the American war expanded, Tin found himself in personal crisis and turned to painting as a way of channeling his feelings of rage and frustration.

posted 11/1/2006  BRIAN APPEL on Andy Warhol's Mao at L&M, Skulls and Hammers & Sickles at Perry Rubenstein
	Warhol showed uncanny acuteness in introducing the Mao image into his art at a time when the artist himself was just coming to enjoy the full-scale benefits of Western ‘decadence’.

posted 11/3/2006  DEBORAH GARWOOD on Beat Streuli at Murray Guy, Jesper Just at Perry Rubenstein
	Streuli’s emphasis on the urban individual who is unaware of the camera has been compared to Walker Evans’s famous series of subway riders. At the same time, his preference for stylish individuals isolated within the picture plane brings to mind portraitists such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Streuli confers a kind of celebrity status on the 21st century figure of Anonymous.

posted 11/3/2006  DAVID CARRIER on "High Times/Hard Times" - New York Painting 1967-75 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum
	What unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

posted 11/3/2006  JOE WALENTINI on Leah Durner at Wooster Art Space
	A pleasantly unfinished, often chalky, raw quality provides these paintings with their authenticity.

posted 11/3/2006  ERIC GELBER on Liu Ye at Sperone Westwater, Kyung Jeon at The Proposition, Chie Fueki at Mary Boone
	Pop appropriation meets eroticism in the work of Liu Ye and Kyung Jeon. Along with Chie Fueki's large, busy, and heavily textured paintings of psychedelically decorated athletes, these artists are linked by their use of allegory.

posted 11/3/2006  MIRIAM BRUMER on Amy Myers at Mike Weiss
	Scientific references abound,, but they are never obvious or overly specific. Instead of being thrust at the viewer, they have been absorbed and then transformed into a totally personal and enigmatic amalgam.