ALL BANGERS, ALL THE TIME

"The collisions in the studio parallel the layers upon layers of ideas that occur within a single work. One work imprints onto an adjacent piece to become part of its history. In the end, each work is the result of an animated interplay, a simultaneous back-and-forth on a single canvas and across multiple works."

- Rochelle Steiner

"Brian Alfred’s paintings and videos are seemingly serene explorations of a pictorial tradition of flatness (in the portrayal of landscape and city life from the street) — a tradition that extends back to Ukiyo-e prints and the resulting Japonisme movement in nineteenth-century France, and forward through such contemporary iterations as the paintings of Allan D’Arcangelo and Alex Katz. I say 'seemingly' because part of their frisson arises from an anxiety — a shadow of doubt deeply imbedded in Alfred’s compositions that insinuates all is not quite in order, or even present."

- Stephen Westfall

"I have come to think of Phillip Allen as one of the most wonderfully challenging painters around."

- John Yau

"The vitality of these metamorphoses – their energy, their capacity to communicate, their ability to follow the modernist poet Ezra Pound’s exhortation to 'Make It New!' – is what matters. Elise Ansel’s glorious, vibrant paintings take up Pound’s challenge with bold exuberance: an artist engaged with – even enamored by – the glorious masterpieces of our antecedents, (Titian, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Manet, among others) and energized simultaneously by a desire to celebrate and profoundly to reconceive them."

- Claire Messud

"Viciously unsentimental, each added layer obliterates what came before it. Rather than allowing for slow-brewed developments, gradual growth and additive details, Appel’s impatient paintings go for slam-bang transformations: all-or-nothing gambits with no middle ground and very little past residue." 

- David Pagel

"Bo Bartlett is a consummate narrative realist, a true believer in painting’s ability to transform time into riveting moments. See his gored matador lying, dying before an equally bloodied bull as both teeter on the edge of the abyss. This masterpiece of restraint and control, and others of similar ilk, suggest that Bartlett is making his finest work yet."

- Jerry Saltz

"At this point, Bedford’s subversive vedute take on a sedimentary dimension. They thicken with paint as they thicken with time. But more importantly, Bedford decomposes images whose original and overlaid subject matter speak to that other decomposition — of organic material. These are not copies. They are tracings along the contours of decay: decrepit worldviews amid a decrepit land." 

- Matthew Jeffrey Abrams

"We relate, wonder — about exhaustion, parenting, isolation, the anticipation of catastrophe. It is not just that the paintings invite us to empathize with other people, real or imagined, as much figurative art does. It is that they seem keyed to elicit the shocking shift in worldview that that comes when we see, for the first time, through another’s eyes."

- Elizabeth Buhe

"But while Benson acknowledges this digital legacy, so too does she stage a small act of resistance against the cold, two-dimensionality of the screen. Repeatedly, her work applies pressure to its own surface, pushing up and out of its skin via forceful acrylic schmears, angular lacerations and interconnected slugs of paint piped directly from the tube. Benson has spoken of a ‘nostalgia for digital processes,’ but now we locate a second and somewhat incongruous longing: for a haptic thingness that is at odds with the ephemerality of our contemporary age. Here, a reinvestment in the physical memory of expression, a belief that gestures should stick."

- Harry Thorne

"Blanck’s portraits, which border on realism, Impressionism, and even Fauvism, are compelling because they invite us to consider not only the scene before us, but also the very act of its depiction––where color, texture, and form reshape our perception of both the subject and the medium."

- Rebecca Schiffman

"Brock’s display of diverse paint application methods and textures—each possessing its own temporal and psychological associations, and ranging in feel from the intuitive to the measured—is presented in a nonhierarchical context, in which each element is assigned a comparable importance. "

- Dan Adler 

"Suzanne Caporael is a consummate colorist."

- Leslie Camhi

"Cherkit is a master of detail, but references to the canons of abstract painting disturb the overall realism of his work."

- Mara Hoberman

"Cowan is perpetually present — in the paint application, color modulations, mimicry, restraint alongside whimsy, and her inclination toward unlikely dimensions that confound predetermined formats for contemporary viewing. Cowan works in future perfect where generous emotions will have kept us together."

- Paul Druecke

"Critics have described many of her large-scale, epic compositions as contemporary history paintings. But she does not depict history as it unfolded or even as we wish it had unfolded. Instead, she shows history as we might actually receive it today distorted, manipulated, heightened, blurred, and out of context."

- Julia Halperin

"Karin Davie’s abstract paintings have a visual energy that any painter might envy, but their connection with a viewer is on a much deeper level.... Her art constantly questions assumptions about beauty, pleasure and spectatorship in painting as a way of obliquely reflecting on their place in everyday life — especially as regards the body and gender. As was already apparent to me when I first wrote about Davie’s work back in 1993, her works 'engage the politics of representation,' no less than its pleasures."

- Barry Schwabsky

"Graphically, her paintings could be described as occupying a point somewhere between cartooning and cartography, abstraction and figuration. But Davis’ pictorial landscape is, by design, much more elusive than that. Her carefully articulated images are oddly familiar but essentially ephemeral, visually resonant but also deliberately enigmatic."

- Phoebe Hoban

"The tendency of Dodge’s zigzags to fall apart and reconstitute, along with the glitch passages and paint blobs, all hearken back to the fuzzy images of his pre-digital youth, summoning memories of 'falling in love with drawing in the presence of a screen,' as he put it to me."

- Daniel Gerwin

"...civility, modesty, and regularity are altogether absent from the work... Dowell's images speak less of an ordered aesthetic than of an improvisatory way of living, a life dedicated to shredding the elephantine, machine-tooled banality of Public America - and to reassembling theses tatters quickly, on a day to day basis and under maximum stress, into a new and more restlessly congenial landscape."

- Dave Hickey

"The desire to assimilate — to blend into American spaces — resonates with the artist; accordingly, in his work, he invites his subjects to occupy the places they wish to inhabit, and storytelling lays the foundation for this process." 

- Charles Moore

"Essenhigh’s paintings revel in a somnambulist dynamism that sweeps the viewer through moody forests and indoor cafes in which alien life forms look up suddenly, as though seen for the first time. Her work posits the feeling of being half awake and in the twilight stages of dreamlike movement, a period in which consciousness is scrambled and the banality of the everyday is re-presented as alternative life forms seen, sensed, and felt. Essenhigh’s paintings offer an animistic responsiveness in which plant life and non-Anthropocene beings become cyphers for human-like behaviors and feelings."

- Jenni Sorkin

"Franklin Evans, an artist who has long grappled with questions of tradition and influence, avails himself of all these approaches. In his anthological paintings and installations woven from countless art-historical citations he subsumes his own identity into the visual heritage of the past (and present), confronts questions of originality and innovation and, last but not least, invokes the artists in his own pantheon with an intensity that borders on obsession."

- Raphael Rubinstein

"Everything is about sex, the joke goes, except sex, which is about power. I'm reminded of this when I look at Eveleth's work: Sex is always there, to be sure, but just out of view, and the more explicitly it's suggested the more it comes to seem like a cipher for something else."

- Jackson Arn

"The power of Finley’s art arrives not only from the dazzling and mesmerizing play of light, color, and texture on each surface, but from a pulsating force that is felt by the viewer, although its source remains hidden. Emanating from just below the surface, in an unfathomable depth, there is an indefinable place full of life, light, rhythm, and energy."

- David Ebony

"The new work here, continuing her series of faceted, urethane-shellacked wood forms that protrude from the wall (a funny play on the idea of "relief"), are a workaround to figuration — about the body but never depicting it, geometric abstraction as a feint to talk about contemporary culture, and what we ingest to cope with it."

- Max Larkin

"This is one of my ways of explaining, at least partially, a feeling I have always had about Fries’ paintings, that they are the most European ‘American-style’ paintings I have ever seen. Of all the continental exemplars of rowdy, American, abstraction, Fries’ I think, are the most knowing and cosmopolitan, the most forgiving of nature and culture catastrophically jumbled, the most tolerant of the past and present fatally blurred."

- Dave Hickey

"I love all the ways we claim and define domestic space!"

- Gabrielle Garland

"While also intuitive and open to aspects of interpretation, Gatson is deeply invested in care, similar to the approach of surrealist painters Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton. These artists often used a method called ‘automatism’ or ‘drawing the invisible’ to connect with the metaphysical and subconscious process of painting. The artist Emma Kunz pioneered automatism as an important technique in her definition of spiritual art. Art historian, Yasmin Afschar, describes Kunz as a researcher and a healer and that the artist ‘only became an artist posthumously,’ referencing how the artist’s visual practice dictated her primary identity. Healing was also Kunz’ intention; this is conveyed in her use of the hypnotic symbol of the mandala, as a central motif."

- Erica N. Cardwell

"We might think of Gornik’s paintings, then, as images of the landscape as it is internalized. When she paints the glint of sun on water, she translates a feeling stored in memory about the sun hitting water, about being within and of the environment. In this way, her work finds resonance in the paintings of Joan Mitchell, who took a synesthetic approach to landscapes and who sought (to paraphrase Mitchell) to paint what nature left her with. Gornik works in a similar spirit, recording images recalled from experience, accounting in her revision for the contingent elements of light and temperature, as well as for the obscuring veil of memory."

- Annie Godfrey Larmon

"Elliott Green’s ambition has always been defined by intelligence. His euphoric paintings are all light and space one moment and paint and canvas the next. The fascinating conversation between abstraction and landscape is a mystery that the viewer can’t unravel. The paintings evoke the heroic by attempting the impossible. Belief and doubt duke it out, and our disappointment is replaced by exultation."

- American Academy of Arts and Letter

"With Field Flowers and Queen Anne’s Lace, Greenfield-Sanders truly rounds out the diverse ways we experience her art. The wildflowers she depicts grow so densely and appear to be so close to us that we feel as if we are practically confronting a jungle. By filling her canvases with these growths, we occupy what’s called a worm’s eye view. These paintings, which feature so many plants and flowers, also are the most animated. Do we hear birds chirping? No, it is more like insects issuing a symphony of sounds. And, as we imagine their cacophonous tones, we realize just what a rich sensory experience Isca Greenfield-Sanders offers viewers of her art. This is landscape painting refreshed and practiced with understated originality.”

- Phyllis Tuchman

"In my mind, I imagine them at the local bar, Greenberg waxing that in order to maintain its distinction from the other arts, Abstract painting must focus exclusively on its inherent physical characteristics: surface, texture, color. Raising his glass, as well as his voice, he would intone, 'A painting must look like a painting, even if it is abstract! It should not refer to anything else. It should not pretend. This is not theater!' Haggerty would nod his agreement, echoing his love of the fundamental characteristics of painting. He would likely add, 'But every art should have its double-takes, its subtle contradictions, and its theatrical aspect. After all, look at Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter.' By the time Haggerty was halfway through his list, Greenberg would be out the door, leaving Haggerty with the bar tab."

- Michael Auping

"Jacob Hashimoto has created a new aesthetic playing field that is authentically inviting and is exceedingly elaborate in its multitudinous and multiform presence."

- Eric Shiner

"Over all, there is a strange effect: The surface has such energy that it seems to make the canvas all but disappear."

- Roberta Smith

"Isermann’s art of the past forty years has been crucial to the emergence of design as a discipline laden with the same potentially powerful critical capacities attributed to traditional painting and sculpture. Despite misplaced historical qualms about design’s capacities, and along with artists diverse as Scott Burton, Jorge Pardo, Pae White and Andrea Zittel. He has been instrumental in changing the terms of the conversation. Central to this achievement are four aesthetic elements seamlessly fused into the virtuoso Santa Fe commission.

- First, the wall’s modular form is purely minimalist.

- Second, the silver screen in entirely pop.

-Third, the absolute logic behind the result’s irrational splendor is wholly conceptual.

- And, last and far from least, the curb-appeal design for a public building is rooted in a radical commitment to domesticity - the private shelter and refuge from hostility provided by the home - that positions Isermann as an avatar of queer culture."

-  Christopher Knight

"All of the paintings on display imply situations of creative living and working, incorporating the figures in ways soft and absolute within the décor, landscape and architecture. Whether as individuals or societies, all that we create has the power to overwhelm or outlast us. We’re not as central as we’d care to imagine to any given scene – even one of our own creation – yet, still we leave a mark. In Kalenderian’s continuation of the US impulse to reject perspective – from Grandma Moses to Andy Warhol – his social and professional circle provide him with the excuse to paint both the physical and emotive. These kaleidoscopic compositions manage to document and dream concurrently."

- Mitchell Anderson

"Tom LaDuke liberates himself from the modern tradition (a painting about painting) and uses very different tools to achieve this: optical phenomena such as reflections, mirrors and shadows, digital manipulations, layering of sources . . . as he said, 'There is no edge, no entrance into my paintings.'"

- Vincent Honoré

"What is remarkable about the performative aspects of Lawlor's gestural marks has to do with her ability to lay down discrete passages of paint that capture a moment in time, a movement in space, and a trace transcription across the grain of the canvas"

- Grant Vetter

“Patrick Lee’s gorgeous portraits of tough young men are great works of art because they entice you to imagine what it might be like to live in someone else’s skin.”

- David Pagel

"There’s a lot going on in what is ostensibly a tranquil scene."

- Matt Price

"Gestural and calligraphic to the point of being lyrical, Martin’s canvases achieve smooth surface planes, open fields of color, and a general economy of means through the use of a line that is so vigorous as to be decidedly expressive. At times, her paintings look like oil-on-canvas records of various moments after the big bang — with clouds of primordial elements jockeying to become planets and stars."

- Christian Viveros-Fauné

"His signs and symbols aren’t just the obsessive marks of an artistic mind, but rather, an alphabet of his practice."

- Julie Baumgardner 

"Melini’s presentation is both a rigorous examination of material and color, and an ethereal homage to nature. In sum, it is a call to observe the forces, seen and unseen, that shape our existences from the cellular level through the spiritual."

- Sara Roffino

"Min’s paintings, alive and awash in color, evoke both her own radical pleasure and the unconstrained excess that imbues wild life."

- Nick Herman

"Evoking Helen Frankenthaler’s blocky fields of poured color, the saturated hues of her photographs seem to simultaneously protrude and recede into space, yielding surprisingly tactile visual sensations."

- Annabel Osberg

"There is ample work to be considered in the painting of every layer; There is also the waiting. The strata building up on the surface index both painting and drying, work and rest, starts and stops."

- Adam Milner

"Pfaff’s 'flat' works are never quite flat. They periodically grow off the wall and into the room in spatial aspiration. Even if they don’t physically break the picture plane, they almost always ex- tend laterally, in time. The montage of forms is cinematic in scope."

- David Levi Strauss

"Rae’s tropes are about discrete forms and their constant movement: Her lines, swoops, daubs, and rumbly coils of shape and suggestion are always on the move in her compositions, even when they are configured with military precision. (She doesn’t often restrict them this way, though; her forms are restless). Often, they speak with one another, or over one another, even across a wide plane when some are on the far north side and others are on the south; they interrupt and finish one another’s thoughts. Often, they are moving in and out of verse or chorus, whether they are singing dirges, ballads, shout choruses, or lullabies. But the evolution of Rae’s work is unmistakable. "

- Christina Rees

"Reafsnyder has claimed gestural abstraction for California, where art was going when he started painting, and this changes the relationship between the painting and the beholder substantially. No more hazy cozy. The painting becomes a colorful, decorous superman, and the beholder becomes one of superman’s pals. They are tough but polite, and they will grow together with time, while still being themselves."

- Dave Hickey

"Daniel Rich’s reticulated cityscapes and slick façades appear at first glance to be quite literally superficial whether it’s a geometric exterior pressed close to the picture plane or a cluster of multiple structures glimpsed from a distance, we experience architecture in his painting as a wholly exteriorized phenomenon- looming close up or made smaller through a 'bird’s-eye view'… In their seeming permanence, the fixed and rigid edifices that populate his work speak to a late capitalist urbanism that sees its monuments, not as contingent, but as in movable and eternal."

- Ara Merjian

"The artist's sober treatment of his explicitly bizarre subject matter, reflecting a strategic decision to think weird and paint straight, sets up the constant but always understated tension between form and content, between overt, even extravagant stylization of the image and restrained, even conservative use of his considerable technical virtuosity that energizes all of his pictures."

- Robert Storr

"That's what his paintings do beautifully: make viewers doubt our perceptions and question our assumptions so that we might see reality with fresh eyes - as an unwritten story in which fact and fiction intermingle, playfully and purposefully."

- David Pagel

"The sheer wealth of visual data in [his] paintings continues to generate informational overload or entropy in viewers, which is evident in different degrees in all Siena’s work, but with his preference for a new type of visual music he does so in a more melodic manner than he did in his earlier art. Writing of the heightened entropic state he still wishes his imagery to invoke in viewers, Siena prioritizes the 'granular scale' he vivifies and amplifies in his compositions, so they might approach a new form of mathematical sublimity."

- Robert Hobbs

"The still lifes are, in a sense, portraits of shirts. They have the feel of talismans or relics, evoking the presence of the absent men while emphasizing that no picture captures the totality of an individual. Their impact, like the impact of all portraits, resides in the imaginations—and interior emotional lives—of viewers."

- David Pagel 

"I see painting as a vessel for time travel where the relationship between the body and landscape is explored, carved, and captured to chart a history of movement. There is an intensity of labor required in my process, where time exists as a material that gets banged around just as much as the physical paint and pigmented stone itself. The process of accumulation begins a conversation with the past, while discovered forms project ideas into the future, color in painting on the other hand forces one to experience the present."

- Tracy Thomason

"Because van Genderen’s finished paintings retain an air of transparency, of open- ness, or even sometimes of incompleteness, they invite us to try to understand them by taking them apart, by reversing the processes of their construction."

- Jonathan Griffin 

"Emily Weiner works Jungian analysis into something completely fresh. Theater curtains, spirals, facial profiles and planets all take on new dimensions when viewed through Weiner’s fastidious, beauty-forward lens. Not to mention the custom frames, which act like grounding signifiers and underscore the way frames often stand in for artworks themselves."

- Laura Hudson Hunter

“Looking at a painting by Wilson is its own reward. But it’s more than that. There’s a sharpening of perception, a focusing of thinking, an extension of attention span, and an expansion of consciousness.”

- David Pagel