• Painting

    FLY ON THE WALL – Delicious Mischief

    Americans have little patience for depth or nuance. We are a literal people. We want things when we want them. We prefer the surface of things. We want the answers to our questions presented to us with no funny business. Excel charts, bullet points, sequential outlines and cliff notes make us feel secure and in control. Leaves all the froufrou out of it and we know exactly where we stand. When Stella painted the Black canvases he used a simple recipe to make straightforward things that succinctly encapsulated the endgame of American Modernism. Direct. Egalitarian. Incontrovertible. And he would hammer…

  • Painting

    FLY ON THE WALL – Dead But Won’t Lay Down

    “In a period epitomized by Godard’s “Breathless” (1960), striving young Europeans shook off the war-dimmed legacies of their national cultures for the confident flash of things American. New York Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and, a bit later, minimalism became…

  • Painting

    Robin Greenwood

    Artists are a strange lot. They can be pig headed and argumentative. And some, when they are totally convinced that they are right, can be downright offensive. Hey, artists are human. And that was what appealed to me straight away…

  • Painting

    Hello, World! Or The Passage From First-Order to Second-Order Painting

    Li Trincere, Untitled (T14), 2022 David Richard Gallery, New York https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/620-li-trincere https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/621-li-trincere Mike ZahnFebruary 2023 Today, in 2023, a painter rarely presents work without an aside which admits to the dispossession of this moment. It becomes clear as style is…

  • Painting

    “Julianne Montague: A Composition in Six Parts”

    New Work by Mike Zahn Gesso ArtspaceMaria Lassnig Straße 33 1100 Wien January 2023 MZ_JM:1.17.22 “Julianne Montague: A Composition in Six Parts“, 2023Detail of gallery viewGesso Artspace “Julianne Montague: A Composition in Six Parts” presents the work of one artist by…

  • Painting

    Fett auf Mager

    Jean-Frédéric Schnyder Mike Zahn23 January 2023 Jean-Fréderic SchnyderDetail from the exhibition Jean-Frédéric SchnyderVienna SecessionJanuary—May 2023 https://secession.at/ausstellung_jean_frederic_schnyder_en Contemporary art risks fatigue through repetition of and familiarity with that which is seen. Furthermore, given the ubiquity of the Internet, suspicions are harbored that everyday…

  • Painting

    Mit Jai Inn, Rudolf Polanzky, Andreas Reiter Raabe

    Mit Jai Inn, Rudolf Polanzky, Andreas Reiter Raabe Gesso Artspace33 Maria Lassnig Straße 1100 Wien January 2023 www.gessoartspace.com www.instagram.com/gesso.artspace Mit Jai Inn, Rudolf Polanzky, Andreas Reiter RaabeGallery view Gesso Artspace January 2023 The mantle of abstraction specifies certain processes which…

  • Painting

    George Hofmann – Dialogue

    In Painting, gesture is language…. George thought it would be interesting to start a discussion about painting, about this moment in time for painting, and so, he gives us a loaded topic that still resonates with painters today. What is…