Morgan reviews “Mouth to Mouth,” a suspenseful new novel by Antoine Wilson about told almost entirely through one conversation. When the narrator (a nameless struggling author) runs into an old acquaintance from UCLA (successful art dealer Jeff Cook) at the airport, Jeff confesses to saving a drowning man’s life. When he learns the man’s identity, renowned gallery owner Francis Arsenault, he becomes obsessed with determining if he is a “good person” worthy of being saved.
Read MoreKate Brock says this rich and complex tpairing of shows at Arcadia invites “dialogue around intergenerational, artistic exchange.” Polly Apfelbaum- maybe best known for her hand-dyed, velvet “fallen paintings”- is is an artist who shows widely; David Ellinger, who was born 42 years before Apfelbaum, was a painter of some renown, of Dutch-German-influenced scenes. He was also an antiquarian and a ‘female impersonator.’ The show, and its documentary materials about Ellinger’s life, explores the intersection of two artists of different generations who never met but whose work seems to be in dialogue.
Read MoreSyd Carpenter’s Farm Bowls are mini-portraits of the farms and people she met on trips through the South. Named after these family farms, the Farm Bowls are “remarkable variations on the same, simple form” says reviewer Andrea Kirsh, who also comments about the “Mother Pins” that “they have stunning ranges of textures, coloring, and forms.” The exhibit is at Rowan University Art Gallery until March 26, 2022.
Read MoreAndrea sees works on paper that she first saw in the late 1960s by Anne Ryan, and notes that the highly controlled collages stood apart from the time’s big gestures by abstract expressionists. Andrea says Ryan’s collages are “important reminders… that first-rate art comes in many forms and needn’t follow the common path.” See it at Washburn Gallery, NYC, thru April 2, 2022.
Read MoreKate Brock has a close encounter with Sarah Gamble’s paintings and drawings, works that Brock says are in the lineage of the “spiritual-abstract” of Hilma af Klint and the surrealism of Leonora Carrington. She also brings up the exoticism of Elvis! “I see Gamble’s kaleidoscopic worlds as an effort toward a speculative realm, wherein the spiritual, the creaturely, astronomical, atomic, and Elvis all bump into each other, and new poetry is formed.” Enjoy this great review, and catch the exhibit at Fleisher-Ollman, up until March 12, 2022.
Read MorePatrick Coué sees the materially-complex paintings by Shwarga Bhattacharjee and calls the works a perfect immersion into a reverie space far away from our “world of constant mediated inputs.” The works are both abstract historical landscapes and topographic maps, that are layered with meanings and feelings, Patrick says.
Read MoreMary Obering’s geometric abstractions glow from the placement of gold leaf on their tops or sides and Andrea Kirsh says they are like nothing else being made today. The work is up at Bortolami through Feb. 26, we recommend you get over and see this under-known artist and her glowing works.
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