Andy Martinelli Clark

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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