Works by two painters with different sensibilities and subjects but similar color choices have a great conversation at the University City Arts League. Ilana Napoli gets in on the conversation and tells you about it in her review. The show closes today (March 24) at 5PM. Run over and see it!
Read MoreIn Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s paintings, faces go from cartoony (masks, he says) to realistic. The subject is the body, the black male body, the black queer body. Jonathan, who got his MFA from PAFA in 2016, is soft-spoken but intense. Easy to talk with and direct in his answers, no BS. Four of his works are in the current Fleisher-Ollman exhibit, up to Jan. 28. Among other things in this conversation, Jonathan talks about his materials. His works are filled with materials-brio.
Read MoreThrough a slow reveal of subtle color relationships, sophisticated tonal shifts, contrasting glossy and flat surfaces, and carefully articulated edges, Belcourt masterfully explores the figure ground relationship in her paintings. This formalist play is not a new device in painting, but her commitment to this approach in an age when appropriation is ubiquitous is unique.
Read MoreFrom the walls of color in his series that continue throughout the Breuer, to his earlier work, the oversized snapshots, the smaller pieces that take on death, black identity in America, and his deep, painfully humorous comics, Marshall is an artist who has worked and played his way into the all-important arts conversation.
Read MoreWhy don’t we know about Paula Modersohn-Becker? The book reveals she showed her work but a few times while she was alive, she died young at age 31, and the modernist style and nudes, made in the last year of her life, 1906, were a shock when discovered. No one quite knew what to make of her work. “Greatness” an early critic said; in the same decade of 1910s another said “odd.” This book is the first in English to give a definitive account of her life, exhibition and critical history, and art historical assessment.
Read MoreThis publication is the result of one of those relatively rare but exciting discoveries in the depths of a large museum’s store rooms–an album of drawings by one of the great illustrators and print designers, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Moreover, it likely corresponds to the original drawings for one of his announced, but never-printed, best-selling books of illustrations. It was billed as Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book; Iitsu was one of Hokusai’s more than thirty aliases, and the term “chicken-rib” refers to a Chinese literary term for something trivial but worthwhile–like the bits of chicken left on the rib bones.
Read MoreIt’s not often that the whole of an exhibition overpowers its component parts. But with the sharp, brilliant shapes, vigorous diagonals, and eye-popping colors that come at you from practically every direction, Hues Muse at Mt. Airy Contemporary is a show that does just that. With eleven strong paintings by four local artists, Hues Muse feels almost like a grand celebration of color and shape arranged by those avowed colorists, Josef Albers or Ellsworth Kelly. Everywhere you turn, some bright, otherworldly being or design faces you, or provides a window through which to peer, or presents you with something you cannot resist mind-playing with. Bravo to curator Andrea Wohl Keefe.
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