After 25 years of painting, EJ Hauser says she still feels like “a sculptor who paints” and sometimes even envisions her paintings as depictions of imagined sculptures. The large works on papered canvas exhibited for Surviving Sandy readily deal with the flat marks of drawing and direct handwriting yet these explicitly two-dimensional components are structured and…

From the built-up masses of paint and sand to the oil seeping into the linen, erasure makes the body spongy and absorbent in Rita Ackermann’s Picnic (2012). One has the sense that with Ackermann the figure is always both itself and becoming something else—multiple painting methods, events, and even zones make their way into a…

Works by New York/Alaska-based Sienna Shields, and C. Finley of New York and Rome, are rich with texture and color. Chock-full of compiled items, Shields’s collage paintings and Finley’s mixed media mandala are comprised of layered materials that cohere together to produce whole works. These artworks are neither overwhelming nor disorganized—rather they are visually diverse,…