In a dimly lit cubicle on the third floor of Industry City’s mammoth warehouse, six masterpieces of modern photography stare out across a room; still, serious, and open, waiting for a viewer to wander in. Of the six, four are portraits, ever so slightly larger than life and very direct—no titles, no names, no context,…

Mike Cloud insists on the content of form and the figures of abstraction. A primary strategy in this aim is literalism. Blood Diamond, Cloud’s painting on the second floor of Surviving Sandy, is about diamonds and looks like one. Much of the paint depicts what look like building blocks, a reference to geometric abstraction as…

There is something on the move. It’s a total grey-out; a haze of billowing fog clears to reveal a shapeless form. The form appears to have two wispy arms, and at the end of each arm there are hands that gesture with charismatic force. The form is active and airy, and it weightlessly hums and…

Suzanne Joelson’s assemblage of paintings titled Rhymes with Orange is a kind of visual meditation on the color orange. But just as “nothing rhymes with orange,” the paintings that comprise it live in conversation with one another, a kind of slant-rhyme that bounces meaning and formal devices from one panel to the next, throwing them…

It is easy to be carried away by the undulating lull of the swoops and licks that characterize Joanna Pousette-Dart’s stunning compositions. The flat, imperfect crescents and loosely coiled ribbons that inhabit her stacked canvases convey a command of curvature, a language of movement that swings wide between grandeur and whimsy. Each arc both echoes…

Whenever I look at James Siena’s work, I am reminded of a very funny review of a Siena drawing show at Gorney, Bravin + Lee by Jerry Saltz in The Village Voice back in 2003. In his typical self-deprecating manner, Saltz describes his attempts to reproduce Siena’s drawings in his own home after coming to…

In the late ’80s, I was part of a group of loosely affiliated abstract painters spanning Brooklyn and Manhattan. For these guys, and they were all guys, Gary Stephan had cult status. In particular, John Otte had a reverence for Gary’s paintings born of a short stint as his studio assistant. His roommate Erick Johnson…

Someone should give Don Voisine a medal for sticking so rigorously to one format for so long! As a fellow painter I stand in awe of those like Voisine who continually manage to mine the same restrictions, and invariably come up with something new. Voisine’s current working method, which goes back a decade, if not…

Margrit Lewczuk’s bright paintings titled Connie’s Drum and Green & Purple were installed facing her husband Bill Jensen’s intense diptych Passions According to Andrei (Rublev/Tarkovsky). The adjoining wall was hung with a cluster of eleven of Lewczuk’s smaller paintings, drawings and collages interspersed with eight of Jensen’s brush drawings in black ink. Where Jensen’s work…

The sculptures of Chris Larson speak of destruction at a pitch that refuses all euphemisms. They are barren and fragile; vacuous vitrines of preserved remnants of violence. Like cages on stilts, each sculpture holds a bed of plaster that chips and cracks within its frame—manmade scorched earth. Tiny matchsticks are broken and carefully stacked; small…

Certain lines from Wallace Stevens’s great elegy for George Santayana, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, capture for me a quality in these paintings by Stanley Whitney: “On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / become the figures of heaven.” In his poem Stevens envisions Santayana dying in a Roman hospital, in…

By the mid-’90s, Richard Serra had become an art world superstar. He had started to become recognized as the world’s “greatest living sculptor,” a superlative so bold and ridiculous that perhaps Serra was the only artist that could be considered for it in the first place. He has never been a subtle artist; his opinions…

As the son of artist Rob Ryman and art critic Lucy Lippard, Ethan Ryman (New York, 1964) was exposed to visual art at a young age. However, like his father—who originally moved to New York to become a jazz saxophonist, only to become a painter instead—he first had a successful career in music as a…

Let’s pretend Alexander Ross’s large paintings of Green Giant green-bean blobby biomorphic forms contain portraits of magnified specimens of metastasizing mutant cellular structures scraped from the skin of one of Alexis Rockman’s futuristic fauna from his Hudson tryptich (Tropical Migrants, 2011), which accompanied Ross’s work in the Sandy exhibition. While gloriously abstract and humorous, Ross’s…

For painter Tom Nozkowski and sculptor Joyce Robins, abstract artists whose work is rooted in the tangible, the world is a complex spider web of interconnections. Both have a predilection for melding the grid with wilder, more primal qualities that put austerity on defense. As Nozkowski once said of his work, “If a painting would…

After years of painting in his trademark style, for which he first gained recognition in the late ’60s, Chuck Close, who is now age 74, has begun to remove what seems to be most essential to his work: his grids, his algorithmic process of painting, and his own hand. His tapestries, two of which were…

There are two primary features that have consistently preoccupied Robert Storr in his pictorial ambition thus far: first, the attraction to reductive abstraction without a link to any particular school or group; second, the pace of the painting awaiting the painter, or one could say his speed of execution, which is slow, deliberate, and restrained…