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….

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…

Lynda Benglis’s work is supremely erotic. Her infamous 1974 advertisements for Paula Cooper are still shocking. I found them in reproduction when I was a teenager and they were one of my first significant revelations about both art and sex. I’ve felt some fear about the possibility that the photographs in my mind might swallow…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive…

If there was ever a moment of solitude behind the scenes of Surviving Sandy, it was early each morning in the sixth floor gallery. There, on the east side of the building, Tom Doyle’s Togher and Clonard, stood majestic and elegant like twin bows of a ship. Streaks of late morning light, cut into rectangles…

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…

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…

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…

Lisa Yuskavage’s two Surviving Sandy monoprints with pastel additions treat young, nubile figures in relatively isolated landscapes. A No Man’s Land 2 is the more narratively obscure of the two. In it, a squatting young woman appears to be making a bonfire like the one already lit to the right of the piece. She wears…

The billboard-sized words “We the People” grow out of and drip from the wall in the outline of calligraphic script. Before comprehending the phrase, those of us who live in the United States or are familiar with its culture have already registered layers of meaning and their signifying objects: wigs and waistcoats, quill pens, yellowed…

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…

Yellow white green clock (2012) is an abstract stained glass clock face with Roman numerals. It hangs from a wire so that the “X” is where “XII” should be, meaning 12 is actually at 2 o’clock. Placed against a window with a view of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the clock face transforms the gallery space into…

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…