Andy Warhol | Shadows, 1978-79. Dia Art Foundation. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Photo: Cathy Carver.

Andy Warhol’s relationship to abstraction is charged. Despite a late-career painterly impulse — which included the Shadows series currently exhibiting at the Hirshhorn — his pictorial language based on representation fundamentally questioned the narrative of post-war painting as defined by Clement Greenberg. And the implications of Pop Art’s emergence over Abstract Expressionism were significant, not least for black artists as changes in collecting preferences opened new doors for art about the African American experience. This was the premise of a talk by art collector Henry Thaggert at the Philips Collection in Washington D.C. a few years back. It’s a perspective that Kara Walker seems to echo, at least indirectly, in a talk on Andy Warhol scheduled for next week at the Hirshhorn. I recently caught up with Thaggert to talk further about Warhol, get his thoughts on collecting art, and about his involvement in the local art scene. You can read my interview with Henry on the New American Paintings blog.

Chip Allen | LALC 01, 2011, Oil on Paper, 22 x 26 in, courtesy of the artist and Heiner Contemporary

Chip Allen’s letting loose. He’s squeegeed, splattered, and gesturally brushed over his geometric abstractions, and by the looks of it action painting’s winning out. His loose, intuitive marks and smudges run interference across seemingly systematic lines, the resulting balance a taut non-resolution that tugs from opposing ends, even if one end does so a bit harder. But there’s no subjugation here. Amalgamation is more like it, and a methodical contemplation on the all-encompassing potential of his medium — oil in his most recent paintings. Brooklyn-based Chip Allen (NAP #75, 2007 MFA Annual) is exhibiting in a group show at Heiner Contemporary in Washington D.C. I took the opportunity to catch up with the artist and ask him a few questions. His answers and more images of his work on the New American Paintings blog.

The Tower Gallery at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is currently exhibiting a collection of Bochner’s recent Thesaurus Paintings and preparatory drawings alongside his early and precursory text-based Portraits (1966-1968). In the Tower: Mel Bochner thus presents the artist’s reprising of his earlier work — much of which forms the foundation of Conceptual Art and Minimalism — as big, bold canvases inflected with painterly subjectivity. Or as NGA curator James Meyer observed of Bochner’s recent paintings, “a kind of American Realism has entered Conceptualism’s back door.”

Read the rest of the article in the New American Paintings blog.

Installation view of The Working Title, a group show on abstraction curated by Progress Report and exhibited at the Bronx River Arts Center, March 25 through April 29, 2011.

Give it time and the Internet will mobilize for change in just about any arena. So it’s not surprising that artist-run exhibition spaces — always bastions of change — are increasingly striving for a stronger online presence, sometimes even eschewing fixed brick-and-mortar locales all together. And it’s not just exhibition spaces. Artist-run curatorial projects like HKJB, Culture hall, and Progress Report exist mainly on the web, producing information that’s decentralized and disseminated horizontally, peer-to-peer. All of which is relatively new.

One of these projects, Progress Report, is designed as an online curatorial resource centered on visual content and studio visits. Co-founded by Brooklyn-based painters Kris Chatterson and Vince Contarino, their project is particularly keen on abstraction and focuses on the creative process from the perspective of working artists. This is noteworthy not only because Chatterson and Contarino are a couple of accomplished abstract painters in their own right, but also because they prove to have an expansive grasp for what their contemporaries are up to.

More about Progress Report and our conversation at the New American Paintings blog.

Bathroom installation by Andy Moon Wilson, at Curator’s Office

(e)merge kicked off with a preview and poolside party on Thursday evening. Featuring two platforms, one for galleries and the other for unrepresented artists, the fair occupies the first three floors of the Capitol Skyline Hotel as well as the lower level parking garage. I took a look around the gallery platform on Friday — just about 40 exhibitors — and will be checking out the artist platform on Saturday.

Curator’s Office brought a couple of faces that are familiar to the blog — Atlanta-based husband-and-wife Andy Moon Wilson (NAP #45) and Jiha Moon (NAP #63, #70, #82). Some of Moon Wilson’s work comes from his last show at Curator’s, which he discussed with us earlier this year. And Jiha Moon presents her characteristic technicolor works on canvas and paper — we got a peak inside her studio this past January.

Write my full report on the New American Paintings blog.

The Capital Skyline Hotel, site of the (e)merge art fair. Image courtesy of (e)merge.

The (e)merge art fair (September 22 – 25, 2011) — founded and organized by Conner Contemporary Art co-directors Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith, as well as by Helen Allen, founder and former director of Pulse — officially opens its doors tonight at the Morris Lapidus-designed Capitol Skyline Hotel in Washington, D.C.. The focus of the fair is on emerging artists, but not just those arriving via their dealers and gallerists. Nearly half of the approximately 80 exhibitors will be unrepresented artists vetted by a selection committee that included White Columns director Matthew Higgs, megacollector Mera Rubell of the Rubell Family Collection, among other art professionals. Which practically guarantees that (e)merge won’t be another big-box art fair. Earlier this week I caught up with the organizers of (e)merge, no doubt very busy with last minute preparations, to talk about the concept behind their project. You can find my conversation with them at the New American Paintings blog.

Danube Series: There is No Rising or Setting Sun (Day), 2011, ink and spray paint on paper, 22″ x 30″ Image Courtesy of G Fine Art

Gestural abstraction perseveres, and in Washington, D.C. few artists have been as attuned to its provisional potential as Maggie Michael (NAP #94). With There is No Rising or Setting Sun, Michael’s fourth solo show at G Fine Art, the artist has largely left the drips and splatters behind in favor of spray paint and stencils in provisional works on paper, canvas and mylar. And she’s expanded her mark making across the picture plane — gone are the central points that anchored many of her previous paintings. While immediately next door Conner Contemporary asks rhetorically Is Realism Relevant? Michael’s thoughtful consideration of abstraction formulates compelling answers of her own.

Read the rest of my essay on the New American Paintings blog.

Chris Martin, Ganges Sunrise Asi Ghat Varanasi… 2002. Oil on canvas, 129 x 143 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.

It’s easy to see Chris Martin’s interest in outsider art. In fact, it’s often written directly onto his work. A close inspection of the collaged paintings in his monumental installation in the Corcoran Gallery’s atrium yields, among other things, a newspaper clipping noting the death of Purvis Young, arguably the quintessential outsider artist. Other works by Martin, many of them installed in the Corcoran’s rotunda, have textual references to artists who were decidedly insiders but whose works alluded to an outsider’s sensibility — artists like Paul Thek and Alfred Jensen. This second category — the insider with an outsider’s sensibility — is particularly relevant to Chris Martin’s work in Painting Big, on view at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. through October 23.

To read the rest of my writeup on Chris Martin head to the New American Paintings blog.

Installation view, Ted Gahl and Tatiana Berg, Nudashank, Baltimore

If Paddy Johnson calls you a star, you must be doing something right, and lately it seems like Nudashank can’t miss. Most recently it was Out of Practice, a group show artist-run gallery curated at the temporary Art Blog Art Blog exhibition space in Chelsea, which gathered a bevy of exciting young abstract painters including NAP blog favorites Cordy Ryman, Katie Bell, and Maria Walker. Before that, it was their timely show The Shape of Things to Come that caught our attention.

Busy as they are, Nudashank co-founders Seth Adelsberger (Editions #45, #57, #75) and Alex Ebstein opened another group show at their Baltimore gallery over the weekend, Street Level, but not before I got them on record with ten questions. For their answers go to the New American Paintings blog.