Suzanne Hudson

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  print December 2021

  Lee Bontecou

  Although Lee Bontecou remains better known for her sculptures—such as the bulbous, seamed, and multipaneled wall reliefs organized around a central cavity, or the chitinous insectoid objects that hang from ceilings—her career-spanning works on paper have generated due attention in the past few years, most notably in the 2014 exhibition “Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds” at Houston’s Menil Collection, curated by Michelle White. The Menil show spanned fifty years and presented drawings done in soot—a welding-torch by-product the artist discovered while on a Fulbright Fellowship in Rome in 1957 and used

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  print November 2021

  Susan Silton

  “We,” Susan Silton’s first solo show with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, featured a suite of sixteen photographic prints of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in Northern California. Each black-and-white work presents two nearly identical views of coastal redwoods, resolutely earthbound trunks emerging from the grassy floor. Silton shot them on her iPhone; vantages capture clearings and the receding spaces of deep, dense groves that eschew the aperture of sky. She subjected the snaps to Apple filters (more limited than what is currently available, because she made the images between 2014

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  print October 2021

  HIGHER GROUND

  IN 1981, Jay DeFeo was newly ensconced in a loft in Oakland, California, her largest work space in sixteen years. Her last had been the flat she shared with then-partner Wally Hedrick from 1955 to 1965. It was there, at 2322 Fillmore Street in San Francisco—amid a circle that hosted Robert Duncan and Jack Kerouac at the Six Gallery and showed at Dilexi (where Dorothy Miller, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, encountered DeFeo’s work and curated it into the 1959 exhibition “Sixteen Americans”)—that she strove for eight years on The Rose, 1958–66, the one-ton, nearly eleven-foot-tall canvas with

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  print September 2021

  Star Montana

  Over the past few years, Star Montana has framed presentations of her photographs as chapters, arranging them into tightly conceived groupings that reveal something of the lives of her neighbors in East Los Angeles and chronicle the experiences of Montana’s family among them (most profoundly in a series exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles in 2016 and revolving around the untimely death of the artist’s mother). Montana stays close to her subjects, and there is a mutuality of recognition. She images vulnerability in a way that remains resolutely personal even as she insists

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  print May 2021

  Emma McIntyre

  For the inaugural show at Chris Sharp’s new, eponymous gallery, Emma McIntyre presented a lush, terrifically vital suite of abstract paintings that evoke the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. Made with oils that she brought to California when she moved there from New Zealand last year, they represent a continuity of palette—especially in those acid brights that glow from within, as well as in the more punctual interference of small fluorescent-orange polka-dot floaters (sunspots?) that commingle with dusty polluted violet-tinged grays and an assortment of pinkish browns. The works also

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  print March 2021

  Caroline Kent

  For her first solo show at Kohn Gallery, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent hung eight of her oversize acrylic paintings around the venue’s main and commensurately scaled space. The thin unstretched canvases, anchored to the wall by their top edges, suggested an affinity with banners or tapestries, pliant and portable heralds even though their compositions were long since fixed. She describes her signature black grounds as being “unde-finable, unlocatable.” In their materialization of absence, these amorphous settings function as foils for the emergent hard-edge shapes that manifest within them

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  print January/February 2021

  Hard Drives

  IN 1965, Deborah Remington returned to the East Coast after nearly two decades in California, memorializing her homecoming with the painting Haddonfield, named for the New Jersey town where she was born. Below a skewed butterfly shape, a steely abstract form is bisected and from there stutters into a pictorial void as it fans out toward the edges. Centered in its vertical frame like a Cubist figure in a studio portrait, the complex shape self-differentiates from the ground, which features a subtly modulating gradient shading from total opacity at the top to the lighter if still penumbral glow

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  print January/February 2021

  Raymond Pettibon

  Certain recurring iconography is quintessential Raymond Pettibon: breaking waves and other emblems of SoCal surf culture, along with superheroes, dogs, racehorses, Hollywood, and the endlessly malleable Gumby and, as the old theme song for the green guy’s TV show went, his “pony pal Pokey, too.” The new drawings and collages in the artist’s eleventh solo outing here, more than half of which were made in 2020, included mainstays but also addressed the myriad traumatic events coincident with their making. Pettibon’s familiar skewering of American venality and imperialism became even more stringent

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  print October/November 2020

  J. Parker Valentine

  For “Year of the Sphere,” J. Parker Valentine’s solo exhibition at Park View / Paul Soto, the artist presented five untitled paintings, all made this year, comprised of rounded forms—as the title unambiguously suggests. Each canvas was unprimed, unstretched, cut up, and then reassembled by hand with needle and thread; taken as a whole, the show felt like a singly authored exquisite corpse. The reattached panels—circular and rectangular, contiguous and overlapping—were adumbrated by washes of ink, graphite, water-soluble colored pencils, and liquid graphite, which give these objects a hazy,

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  print September 2020

  Sharif Farrag

  For his first show at François Ghebaly, in late 2019, Sharif Farrag debuted pots sprouting arms and gargantuan, technically improbable vases cleaved to expose orifices. Overall, their anthropomorphism was unapologetically libertine, their sensibility underscored by glistening coats of lavish glaze: Sometimes it dripped down the clay contours as an independent, physicalized entity; at others it became nearly selfsame with the forms. Six months later, Farrag presented new porcelain and stoneware works, one of which he made in quarantine, alongside related works on paper. (The drawing Signal Hill

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  print May/June 2020

  Claire Tabouret

  Where some of Claire Tabouret’s older paintings represented groups (of debutantes as well as refugees) and couples (pairs of lovers, wrestling children), those hanging in her second show at Night Gallery mostly framed a single sitter in her signature loose, assertive strokes. With captivating immediacy, these works apprehend the mutability of expression as it plays across a face, registering pursed lips and shafts of light animating a cheek just so. “The Pull of the Sun” consisted of so many profiles of the artist’s partner and friends, who seemed to pivot, instinctually, to the source of

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  print April 2020

  Helène Aylon

  In 2012, Helène Aylon published Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, which gives some indication of both where her life started (she was born in 1931, raised within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn, and later married to and widowed from a rabbi) and where she has ended up. In between, Aylon produced significant series, process-oriented material abstractions that gave way to, among other things, large and fiercely accusatory installations stemming from her antinuclear protests. As was true last year in