The upside of a quieter art news cycle: more time for the real stuff. This week is full of illuminating artist interviews and thoughtful exhibition reviews. I pulled a representative quote from each piece, so between the thumbnail and the snippet, I hope you can tell what’s worth your time. Hope something resonates with you!
“When you listen to Nessun Dorma,” he says, again reaching for music as an analogy, “it makes you cry – but you don’t know what the words are. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to break people’s hearts. I want to make abstraction popular without lowering the bar.”
Cruising was like photography for Tress, with prolonged waiting to catch the eye of other men. 'I was a Ramble wallflower,' he laughs.
Origins, sources — these are what we often crave to know in art, and what Donnelly denies us. The “Dao” (the way) is considered shapeless, a void, which is also an impossible assignment for an artist making physical objects.
"Calder's objects are like the sea, and they cast its same spell—always beginning again, always new. A passing glance is not enough to understand them. One must live their lives, become fascinated by them."
What to do in the face of all that destruction? Find new ways of relating to each other and the world, Ono suggests.
For centuries, it’s been the story of singular men, geniuses who toiled alone brilliantly to change the direction of the canon. “We’re realising art history is a lot more interesting than that,”
“Seen this way, Bourgeois’s abstraction does not stand in opposition to her figurative work but runs parallel to it, addressing the same concerns—fear, control, attachment—by other means. Where the figures confront you directly, these works murmur, repeat, and wait. They trust duration.”
Marcus described her choice of subjects as instinctual, guided by what she called their “presence.” That presence—felt through posture, expression, and gaze—becomes the connective tissue across the exhibition.
They reveal a painter for whom white lies and artistic license were the same, much like a child who disregards the laws of truth not to cause trouble but to stay honest to his inner life.
Zürn’s poems, with their anagrammatic animal and sea themes, mirror romney’s paintings in their disjointed surrealist language. One of Zürn’s poems ends with “A mast rise up in seas and: the lonesome table.” A fitting description for romney’s paintings.
People should follow their own work. Their own life.
The volcano is a site of danger and fertility, destruction and renewal. “The ground of the volcano explodes,” she noted, “and the earth where the lava goes is very fertile. A new beginning.”
The final image is of skeletons coupling after they have been vaporized. In spite of it all, people have a need to couple. Even when they’re being destroyed, they’re still coupling.
“This project delves deep into the intricate tapestry of economic desperation, resilience, beauty, and transformation that defines these often-overlooked corners of American society.
Bradley describes these paintings arriving either “almost like magic” or, more often, like a car accumulating flat tires and “grind[ing] to a halt.” The honesty is telling: the exhaustion is part of the work. These paintings feel lived-with, dragged into being by persistence as much as intuition.
You’re looking for a surprise, so when it comes in, there’s a certain procedure you go through and gestures you make, but something must be quite unpredictable about what you’re going to get at that stage.
If you’ve made it this far, I hope you get out there today or tomorrow to see some art! Send me a note if you’d like a recommendation! xx
