A Lissajous figure, framed within its invisible rectangular confinement, hovers on the top left corner of a canvas. Painted against an indigo-blue background in bleeding tints of white, the figure—a two-dimensional representation of parametric equations used to describe harmonic motion in mathematics—meets its shadow at its bottom right. It shifts further right to merge with…

Geodesic folds reverberating outwards and back, a math explosion onto a white which holds the meaning of crisp. It is the production of subjectivity, dripping infinitesimal color, speckles accumulating to a small, critical mass. Amorphic, ovular dark holes, tone-full, both finished and in progress, shown upright for your inquisitive viewing nature pleasure. Here are inimitable…

Katherine Bradford presents a series of large paintings depicting foreshortened views of hulking ocean liners solitarily moored on the open seas. The horizon in Ship on a Rust Sea (2013) is barely articulated. In fact, it is so swathed in atmosphere that the edges of the forms seem to be sinking in from all sides….

Lois Dodd says she’s not an artist, but a painter. There is a knowledge that comes from making things. It cannot be reproduced by history, or philosophy, or criticism. Artists often say their hands are smarter than they are. She is a painters’ painter. Her work is a resolute refusal to conform to social, political,…

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…

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…

Death in the hands of an artist is almost paradoxical: while as a lived experience it is unknown and unwelcome, as the subject of art it can become a site of wonder, imagination, and inquiry. In other words: death can be generative. In the sense that it inspires the desire to make art, death is…

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,…

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…

Juliet Helmke: I visited your works a few times at Surviving Sandy, but it always took me a while to get close enough, I had to wait for a moment that was completely my own. I heard a lot of people discussing where they had been painted, and a fair number of visitors, not seeing…

The Banker’s Daughter (2009-2010) is a relatively small oil painting (20 x 38”), with five disparate figures and one cat, all curiously placed together in a rustic kitchen. There is little character interaction except from the representation of the artist’s friend Chuck Close, whose exuberant smile of rotted teeth is directed out towards the viewer…

In David Humphrey’s painting Cleaning Up, a tough-girl protagonist leans back as she smokes a neon-tipped cigarette and watches a flirtatious interaction between a nearby tree’s hollows and the eyes on her shirt. The tree ogles, and the shirt—or the young woman’s chest—stares back with cheerful, saucy reciprocity. The girl knows what’s up, unperturbed 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…

Sheila Pepe is known for her woven and crocheted installations and web-like constructions. Carrie Moyer, for her acrylic paintings with organic shapes and spindly offshoots that end in distorted figurative references that recall Dada and Surrealism. The two artists are partners and sometimes collaborators and both are esteemed educators. For Surviving Sandy their works were…

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…

We were already blackened with charcoal that wouldn’t come out even with vigorous scrubbing after the first week of Gwen Strahle’s Drawing Marathon at RISD in 2005. It was a notorious Winter Session elective that locked students from every discipline at the School in the Foundation Studies drawing studios from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m….

Language comes rockishly alive in New York’s streets. In Chinatown, where Wendy White lives, language for the hanzi-illiterate is phenomenally present. White doesn’t derive the words that adorn her canvases from the Chinese signage that, to Latinate-accustomed eyes, look so multitudinous and vibrant. But one does become more aware of text when seeing the profusion…

The word “geometry” was coined in ancient Greece to describe the measurement (metron) of earth (geo). As such, it dealt with concerns regarding physical space, and the ways in which said space could be defined, illustrated and measured. With time, however, as notions of space began to shift from the physical to the abstract, so…

Anyone who has ever been punched squarely in the nose can appreciate those old Tom & Jerry cartoons’ expert rendering of the experience: When struck, Tom’s face would recoil so far that it would disappear into his head. That’s not what it looks like to be punched in the face, but it’s what it feels…

Tamara Gonzales is like a shaman, a female spiritual leader in North Brooklyn. With the most economic means, her ecstatic paintings effuse with kaleidoscopic patterns of color and light. She employs antique lace as a template through which she creates polychromatic washes of spray paint. Lace isn’t girly in Gonzales’s images. Multiple patterns and styles…

It was a great pleasure for me to see Nancy Haynes and Mike Metz, an artist couple with a long tenure of making art in New York, exhibited side by side in Surviving Sandy. To encounter Haynes’s superb paintings is to see a rigorous intellectual practice executed with extreme sensitivity, restraint, and a touch of…

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…

Deborah Kass likes to have fun but with a vengeance. Or as Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, describes her, “Deb is an expert at putting a smile on her viewers’ faces, but she packs a wallop behind those smiles.” Known for her feminist vaudevillian appropriations of the great white male Pop and…

Alex Katz’s three works in Surviving Sandy are painted images of bodies of water. During the show they occupied the large back wall of the first floor, the installation itself therefore an invitation to compare the paintings to each other and consider their roles in a group. Beyond the immediate, obvious similarity that there’s water…

Meanwhile I realized that these bourgeois upper-middle-class interiors were the spaces modernity declared war on, and yet this is the space that paintings come from and return to.   -Matvey Levenstein, Interview with Phong Bui Brooklyn Rail, April 2006   A painter of exquisite quiet where interiority seems to emanate from every brush stroke, Matvey…

New York artist Loren Munk’s paintings depict the art world as a series of maps and thought-bubbles. In an interview with Phong Bui, co-founder of the Brooklyn Rail and curator of Surviving Sandy, Munk cites a job at Utrecht Art Supplies as the opportunity that began his research into the connection between the New York…

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…

The paintings Dark Side of the Moon, Side 1 (Speak to Me) and Dark Side of the Moon, Side 2 (Eclipse), (both made in 2013) are part of a series by Tomas Vu titled Flatlands. Large and highly detailed, they feature a mixture of abstract and representational forms variously rendered through the use of acrylic…

There is bluster here. There is a wind blowing, and a fire rising prickly and rolling. There are waves. There is a multitude that shifts and solidifies and rolls out again. So may pieces in movement, block the light and reflect it back, if moving through the air. But they’re not real bullets. They’re resin….

Elves? Sprites? Muscular fairies? Outcast female deities from a far off land? Naked and vulnerable with breasts exposed, they tumble through space like whirligigs set loose on a stormy day. One lies on the ground, back arched, beckoning to the various limbs that are sticking out of green bushes or maybe those are mutant fruits…

Ellen Phelan’s Field Through Trees, is built up and wiped away—built up again, and blurred. Purple, yellow, blue, the darkness of the tree trunks closest to us shows the strokes of paint as paint, and gives itself away even as it describes that which we are to look through. Past the trees there is a…

I have always seen the background, or the space behind whatever I’m painting in the foreground, as a piece of history. 1 -Alexis Rockman It is well known that as an urban New York City kid Alexis Rockman followed his anthropologist mother through the halls of the famed Museum of Natural History where his gaze…

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…

While the titles of Chris Martin’s “Red, Yellow, Green” #1 and #2 seem to be an acknowledgement of—or maybe homage to—Mark Rothko’s famous masterpieces, the paintings themselves resemble a combination of outsider art and Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., Martin has also lived for long periods in the Catskills and has been…

Unlike most barricades, Rachel Beach’s toll-gate-like structure is an invitation, rather than a barrier. Like much of her work, it comes to us as much as a painting as it does a sculpture: a zig-zagging base snakes upward in lusty gamboge, a charcoal beam rises vertically to support a horizontal arm tattooed with black <s…

The bright clean colors of the monochrome panels shine out from their worldly supports. In Lot 080711 (the radiant future) (2011), the support—an industrial cement mixer with a thick board that carries an orange painting—extends vertically out of the open top, while in Lot 020412 (port) 2012, a more-than-half-ton cement block with a board similar…

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…

Ronnie Landfield asked, “Who are they to tell me I can’t be expressionistic? Who are they to tell me I can’t use imagery or paint landscapes? I don’t care if it’s ‘old fashioned.’” 1 His recalcitrance exemplifies the defiance of a youth spent in New York in the ’60s. 2 I mean, Landfield has spent…

Part of the charm of New York City is the alien aspect of much of its setting: still relatively recent in historical terms, this artificial landscape remains a strange scene to behold. Even the trees dotting avenues and small parks are curated, nature now just another tool that we use in our efforts to make…

“Hold this,” Nicole Wittenberg says, handing me one end of the measuring tape she is snaking across the room. After some calculation she sets the 8-by-4-foot panel of FOX NEWS I (2014) in front of her open studio doorway and marches me straight back to the other end of the hall: “This is fifty feet;…

Since the landmark, monumental work 100–Foot–Long Piece (1969), which can be seen as the painter’s compilation of pictorial vocabulary—one that in alphabetical order is always ready to be realized by his generative experiments with materials and techniques—Joe Zucker has been deemed not only a master of grid-based painting, but a fearless explorer of materials of…

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…