Press

Opening: “Tegene Kunbi: Danjerus Cable” at Margaret Thatcher Projects
A talented abstract artist, Ethiopian-born, Berlin-based Tegene Kunbi makes luscious paintings with richly textured surfaces and linear blocks of vibrant color. Translating the palette of his African roots, Kunbi creates a visual language that can be understood universally. 

Continue to full article

Situated in an old walk-up apartment block in a quiet suburban meighborhood, Gary Carsley's latest exhibition lends another sense to the notion of the contemplation garden. Here an IKEA Gilbert chair - selected for its playful link to Gilbert & George, who in Carsley's words "make works that allowed the viewerd to be with and in the art" - sits in front of a round Chinese garden gate, Astria Portia 4 (Moongate/Stargate) (all works 2014); this lifesize lambda print... (Download PDF for complete article)

I came to New York from Japan in March 1963 after a few months stay in Chicago. I found a lodging in an apartment on West 88th Street off Broadway, where an elderly Japanese man had a lease. It was a so-called railroad shack, and I rented a middle room. I sat on the bed and placed a canvas on the windowsill and made my first few paintings in America. Those, my earliest paintings in New York, were kind of the extension of what I was doing in Tokyo, but with limited material: one small brush and five tubes of cheap oil paint. From there, over a half century of my journey as an artist in New York began....

Continue to full article

Vivianite: Your use of motion, light and color is truly stunning, how did you invent or learn your technique?

Alex Kanevsky: I didn’t really invent or learn it as a technique. I am a slow learner, so it developed over a long time. I am also fairly slow when it comes to actual painting. Slow but impatient. That can be a problem, but over time I figured out how to turn this contradiction into my own way of working. I can’t do slow and methodical accumulation painting: I get bored with careful, planned sort of activity. I also depend on freshness of perception, what zen-buddists call “beginner’s mind”. That is difficult to sustain over a long period. After a while you are just not a beginner. So I work fast, trying to hit the right note every time...

Continue to full article

Pace Prints is pleased to present William Steiger: Explorations & Surveys, on view at Pace Prints Chelsea through February 21, 2015. In the artist’s most recent body of work, he transforms his collection of vintage lithographs by means of collage, altering the narrative of each image. The exhibition will include Silvercup (2014), the artist’s newest aquatint and soft ground edition. The print exemplifies Steiger’s interest in graphic qualities of familiar architectural structures in the modern landscape.

Continue to full article...

William Steiger’s collages are wondrous, often humorous refractions of early American landscapes. They traffic in a very particular kind of anachronism, grafting zeppelins, prop planes, gondolas, bridges, and the gleaming apparatus of the steam age onto the vast plains and prairies of the nineteenth-century frontier. The images dare us to reconcile two equally innocent visions of American life. One is taut, sleek, and brimming with technological optimism; the other is lush, free, and unspoiled. Neither, it goes without saying, have quite panned out as our forebears hoped they might...

Continue to full article

In his recent television series, "Cosmos," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed the human talent for pattern recognition as a double-edged sword. "We're especially good at finding patterns, even when they aren't there," he said, explaining that this helps us makes sense of the world. It's the same thing that drives creativity. In the current show at Troy's Collar Works Gallery, four artists explore patterns through painting and drawing. "Discernible Regularities," which includes Omar Chacon, Amanda Kates, Fernando Orellana and Kenny Rivero, is a sample of the distinctive ways artists might approach patterning, as well as color.

Continue to full article...

We joined Matthias van Arkel and Anna Camner; two artists with distinctive practices, for a drink at the bustling social hub that is Hotel Rival in Stockholm, allowing them to adopt dual roles as interviewer and interviewee with each other, and learned about a shared working past going years back in time. Conversation takes the course from transatlantic journies and fantasies that are yet to be fulfilled to memories from a time that once was... 

Continue to full article... 

I first became familiar with Ted Larsen’s work through art fairs. I am not a big fan of art fairs for many reasons which I won’t get into here but I have been to some of them. Ted’s works at the fairs were not big flashy pieces; they were modestly sized and rather quiet. But they all had very solid presences to stop me and to make me want to ask about the artist. And I had asked about Ted Larsen not once but probably at least three times at different fairs before I solidly registered his name in my head to make me go “oh that’s the artist I like” when I see the work. That might sound like I have no brain to memorize or his works are so unmemorable. Of course that is not my intention. The point I’m making is that it is close to impossible for me to come out remembering names or the works by particular people from going through numbers of art fairs which include thousands of art works in less than ideal viewing conditions. After a while, many works get categorized and generalized into certain types with generally unflattering connotations in my head. But good works by good artists do stand out repeatedly even if they are rather rare. Ted’s work was one of those. The work projects a recognizable atmosphere with its very efficient, smooth and potent visual narratives, most of them are very brief, economical and most of all very effective.

Continue to full article...