picks September 22, 2022

Stephen Polatch

Glasgow-based painter Stephen Polatch creates idylls populated by a cast of elvish figures, swans, cats, and foxes in narratives that unfold in hallucinatory suburban spaces. Throughout this show one can find references to video games, Symbolist art, and religious icons—though one also suspects that an autobiographical thread is running through the works’ allegorical superstructure. These modestly scaled, egg-tempera panels are animated by the friction between the familiar and the strange. Take RIP DoE (all works 2022), in which two revelers, irradiated by golden light, stare blankly beyond the

picks November 29, 2018

Sam Bornstein

When an artist bares an element of doubt in their work, they open a portal to the act of making. This productive doubt characterizes the art of Sam Bornstein, who, like Pierre Bonnard or Amy Sillman, is invested in searching and revision. Bornstein approaches painting from a position of uncertainty, allowing marks and thoughts to eddy on the canvas before they cohere.

Bornstein’s current exhibition, “Daydream Workshop,” comprising twelve paintings in a variety of media, such as oil, acrylic, and silkscreen, gets to the heart of his process. Take Manic Cartographers (all works 2018), an image of

picks March 30, 2018

Milton Resnick

Milton Resnick left New York for Europe in 1946, just as the New York School was reaching cohesion, casting him as something of an outsider. When he came back in 1948, he began a massive figurative canvas on which he worked for months, only to destroy it in a state of exhausted delirium. Resnick arrived at his mature style of heavily impastoed near-monochrome paintings around 1960. The works in this exhibition, “Apparitions, Reapparitions,” suggest that Resnick’s figurative turn in the early 1980s wasn’t an about-face from the sonorous abstractions for which he is best known, but that the figures

Eric Sutphin