Matthew Smith

Benjamin Edmiston, Boxer’s Nose, Snake Brains, 2011 | Gouache, acrylic and silkscreen on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Currently featured in #93, the MFA Annual edition of New American Paintings now on newsstands, Benjamin Edmiston‘s latest work — elaborate paintings, drawings, and collages — is also on view at Nudashank in Baltimore as part of the group show Radiant Fields (also featuring Edward Max Fendley and Steven Riddle). The show opened over the weekend, so I took the opportunity to catch up with Edmiston to play a severely abridged game of 20 Questions.

Read the rest of my interview with artist Benjamin Edmiston (and see lots more pictures of his work) on the New American Paintings blog.

Tracy Thomason (left) and Stacy Fisher (right)

NUDASHANK’s progressive bent can make most local commercial galleries seem downright uncouth. Arguably the crown jewel of Baltimore’s thriving DIY artist-run spaces, NUDASHANK routinely showcases emerging artists that are on a firm upward trajectory, like Nick Van Woert, Matthew Craven, Alex Lukas, and Benjamin Edmiston (included in the current MFA Annual edition of New American Paintings).

Currently on view in NUDASHANK’s expansive downtown space are the works of Brooklyn-based artists Stacy Fisher, Tracy Thomason, and Maria Walker, all of whom work at the intersection of sculpture and painting to varying degrees. Co-curated by gallery founders and co-directors Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger (editions #45, #57, #75), The Shape Of Things To Come, a title with fateful connotations borrowed from a novel by H.G. Wells, is as airy as it is grounded in familiar materials and forms.

Read the rest of my review at New American Paintings/blog

Installation view, Sam Gilliam, Close to Trees, 2011 | Acrylic, polypropylene, nylon, and a mirror, site-specific installation. Courtesy the American University Museum and Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC.

Sam Gilliam’s most celebrated accomplishment — the suspended painting — made its debut at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in September 1969. While other artists like Richard Tuttle and William T. Wiley were also experimenting with the unstreched canvas during the same period, Gilliam’s sculptural approach was revolutionary in that it repositioned the viewer’s relationship with the painting to include the object as well as the space around it, blurring the boundary between painting, sculpture, and architecture for the first time. Hanging from ceilings and walls but also from freestanding objects like sawhorses, Gilliam’s “drapes” left the wall behind to create physical environments that redefined the conceptual and aesthetic boundaries of abstract painting.

To read my interview with Sam Gilliam go to the New American Paintings/blog

Christopher French, "Heat Index", 2009 acrylic on linen, 41.5 x 40.5 inches

The work of Christopher French, currently on display at Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington, DC, can be read as well as seen. The artist has explored braille in his paintings for over two decades, first as textual passages and more recently through his use of braille graphing paper as a painting surface. The tactile braille grids catalogue a taxonomy of colorful circles, offering the potential for additional sensory interaction while implying a hidden lexical meaning.

The titles he often uses — I am a River Who Delights in Overflowing; My First Everything; Remains of the Day, October 19, 2010 — intimate subjective emotional responses that also remain hidden, within seemingly objective abstract forms. This resonant tension, between what we can read in his paintings and what we must intuit, is an important component of French’s work

Continue reading my interview with the artist on New American Paintings/blog.

Mia Feuer, "Collapse", 2009, FLUXspace, Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Diana Cavanaugh.

Mia Feuer’s sculptures don’t care for your personal space. They take inspiration from the inner workings of the urban landscape and bring fractured outdoor structures into the gallery, usually at such a large scale that you’ll have to duck. Her massive site-specific installation at Conner Contemporary Art, Stress Cone, on display through April 30, is no different. All steel beams and cables, it hangs intrusively from the ceiling of the gallery, mangled like the historical detritus of yesterday’s industrial age. It says something about our urban lives — increasingly digital, but reliant as ever on an aging industrial infrastructure.

Read my interview with DC-based artist Mia Feuer on DCist.

Blinky Palermo, Coney Island II, 1975. Acrylic paint on aluminum. Four parts, each: 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (26.7 x 21 cm); overall: 10 1/2 x 57 7/8 in. (26.7 x 147 cm). Collection Ströher, Darmstadt. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Jens Ziehe

The work of German artist Blinky Palermo (1943-1977) can be generally classified into four cohesive groupings: Objects, Stoffbilder (Cloth Pictures), Wall Drawings and Paintings, and Metal Pictures. Like his contemporaries Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, and Richard Tuttle, Palermo interest lied in probing the conceptual limits of painting by exploring unconventional materials, and he did so with an uncommon curiosity for the wide-ranging strategies of his peers and predecessors. Joseph Beuys, his mentor and instructor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, labeled Palermo’s openness to a variety of media as “porosity.” Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977, currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., provides an opportunity for closer inspection of the artist’s ambitious technical versatility.

Continue reading on New American Paintings/blog.

Morse and Ryman have concurrent solo shows at Conner Contemporary Art through March 5. I wrote reviews for both shows, on DCist and on the New American Paintings blog respectively. To read my review of Morse’s work go here, and for my writeup on Ryman’s work go here.

Cordy Ryman, "Window Box," 2010, acrylic and enamel on wood, 54 x 52 x 5 inches Copyright Cordy Ryman, Courtesy Conner Contemporary Art

Brandon Morse, "High Pressure System" installation view, Conner Contemporary Art, 2011