Andy Martinelli Clark

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  picks July 21, 2021

  Amy Stober

  Much has been done with unconventional painting supports, yet the fourteen wall-mounted works in Amy Stober’s assured solo debut resuscitate the idiom in a number of clever and kinky ways. The artist’s primary material is polyurethane resin, which she casts from handbags found in those titillating repositories for unloved effluvia, thrift stores and eBay. Their leathery exteriors are oddly sensual, like the surface of a new dildo. But these protuberant forms—whose openings face the wall as if, lampreylike, they’re suctioned to it—don’t aim to please. In fact, they’re perplexing as hell, especially

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  picks March 30, 2021

  Carolyn Case

  For the past six or so years, Carolyn Case’s maximalist paintings, while ostensibly nonmimetic, have been inhabited by an assortment of quotidian objects such as leaves, vases, and ruled notebook paper. The inclusion of such items speaks to Case’s omnivorous approach to content. Since the pandemic, Case’s subjects have become increasingly domestic—her kitchen and various chores, such as washing dishes after family meals, have served as the raw material for her most recent work, as exemplified by the four oils and eight pastels on view in the artist’s inaugural exhibition at this gallery.

  In Red

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  picks September 25, 2020

  Jo Smail

  In 1985, when Jo Smail emigrated from her native South Africa to Baltimore, she brought with her some scraps of paper. Among these remnants were family recipes, which were often transcribed on the backs of newspaper articles about apartheid. Struck by the marriage of such disparate subjects, Smail integrated reproductions of these archival snippets into jaunty abstract paintings and collages for a show at this gallery in 2017. They are Smail’s most political works to date and remain poignant, especially as her adopted homeland grapples with its own history of violent racial injustice. Smail is

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  picks January 30, 2020

  Robert Irwin

  Having rejected painting’s insistence on viewing reality through a two-dimensional plane with four corners nearly fifty years ago, Robert Irwin opted to forgo the medium’s frame—and the medium itself—in favor of creating “site-conditioned” interventions that responded to the inherent qualities of existing locations. Natural and artificial light as well as scrims (a kind of translucent curtain commonly employed in theater productions) became part of his repertoire and were implemented within architectural surroundings to heighten one’s understanding of perceptual phenomena that might otherwise

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  picks January 09, 2020

  “New Skin”

  “New Skin,” curated by Jason Stopa, is a five-part ensemble featuring a dozen paintings by Clare Grill, Juan Logan, Michael Berryhill, Shirley Kaneda, and Stopa himself—most of whom have been showing in New York for more than ten years. The press release reinforces the division between representation and abstraction, and insinuates that artists trafficking in the latter are somehow more radical. However, these works eschew such pat categories to instead celebrate what Albert C. Barnes called “the qualities which all particular objects share, such as color, extensity, solidity, movement, rhythm.”

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  picks October 10, 2019

  John Zurier

  The thirteen paintings in John Zurier’s solo exhibition—obliquely derived from the atmospheric conditions of Berkley, California, and Reykjavík, Iceland—affirm the artist as a deft painter of weather and light. For over two decades, Zurier’s gestural works have made the most of his preferred medium’s essential ingredients: color and surface. His intimately scaled canvases usually express an affinity for a pared-down palette of warm and cool grays. Yet this presentation offers a few lively exceptions.

  Three commanding pieces from the series “North from Here” (all works 2019) hang together on the