print April 2004

Trevor Winkfield

If there’s something impersonal about the blocky but borderline-hallucinatory realm of a Trevor Winkfield painting, this quality can also be seen as a kind of childlike insouciance, finally piercing in its intimacy. Austere and playful, wicked and sacred, antic and serene in equal measure, Winkfield’s meticulously delineated culinary, musical, mythic, and domestic motifs come together into odd and gracious apparitions on the canvas.

Winkfield, a master of proportion, hints at motion as would the maker of an ancient hieroglyphic frieze: via a slight, studied torquing of the work’s overall symmetries.

print March 2004

Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff’s “Boys’ Art” is a series of twenty-four collaged drawings based on maps, diagrams, and illustrations of mostly obscure historic battles. In these works diminutive figures in Napoleonic, Meso-American, Arabian, Mongolian, and superhero regalia preen, strut, sneak, march, and clash in colorful, lushly detailed landscapes that recall one of Kozloff’s acknowledged influences, Henry Darger. Much of the allure of these drawings stems from the pursed-lipped schoolboy earnestness with which they seem to have been executed, while the complexity of each work—the minute formations preparing

print February 2004

Graham Gillmore

Graham Gillmore’s current work seems to come in two visually distinct types. First, there are those paintings made up of casually modeled words and phrases linked by an intestine-like labyrinth of thought bubbles; these red and blue lines elaborate the innuendo and potential that create each work’s particular sense of drama. In I will you won’t, You do I don’t (all works 2003), variations on the phrases “I won’t I will” and “you won’t you will” vie for our attention in a sort of distillation of erotic gamesmanship. By the time the viewer reaches the lower righthand corner of the work, the

print January 2004

Frank Moore

The extensive recent exhibition of Frank Moore’s last paintings and selected earlier works revealed an obsessive intelligence offset by a dewy-eyed (if winking) indulgence in over-the-top fantasy and shameless kitsch. Moore, who died of AIDS in 2002 at age forty-eight, employed an elementary school affability toward ends both macabre and slapstick, expressive of the vast humor required to grapple meaningfully with such tropes of our contemporary apocalypse as wanton materialism, the degradation of the biosphere, disease, and the Faustian bargains struck in the biological sciences.

One of Moore’s

print December 2003

Alex Katz

The large-scale landscape and flower paintings in Alex Katz’s recent exhibition are luminous paeans both to painterly gesture and to elementary color and form. A few of the landscapes might even pass for abstractions: Green Shadows, 2001, is mostly a furious scumble of dark brushwork; a handful of diminutive yellow flowers at the bottom of the canvas is the only obviously representational passage. In Road, 2002, an initial uncertainty as to what’s being represented resolves as you’re engulfed by the work: It’s two shafts of dappled sunlight bisecting a dark lane, conjuring depth of field seemingly

print September 2003

Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli’s intensely detailed and disquieting mixed-media collages could be considered a redress of the brightly colored, paisley-strewn, and generally utopic art of the ’60s and ’70s. In Us and Them, 2003, Adam and Eve reach for the bough of a bird-laden tree; the archetypal couple has been meticulously assembled out of anatomy illustrations and body parts cut from photos, which have then been laid against a dark background and covered with a thick layer of clear acrylic. The cluster of penises on Adam and the many breasts and buttocks on Eve betray the influence of Indian devotional art,

print Summer 2003

Donald Baechler

In his most recent paintings, Donald Baechler’s visual language has become increasingly abstract and iconic. Despite his reticence about relating his work directly to his life—he’s admitted only that there might be “something vaguely autobiographical” about it—its power stems in part from its capacity to seem so deeply, even naively, personal.

In a group of new paintings, solitary black silhouettes of trees or vases of flowers stand out against a mottled silvery gray background. In Any Human Heart, 2003, a pair of underwear is visible through the paint, in a gesture emblematic of Baechler’s

print Summer 2003

Emily Jacir

For “Where We Come From,” her first solo exhibition in New York, Palestinian- American artist Emily Jacir posed a question to other Palestinians living around the world: “If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” With her American passport and the freedom of movement it ostensibly conferred, she carried out the wishes of twenty-seven compatriots unable to return to or move freely about their home country. The records of these acts, mostly colorful photographs and a few videos, convey a quietly affecting glimpse of the devastation and intimidation that has come

print December 2002

Edwin Dickinson

It’s a pity Edwin Dickinson (1891–1978) isn’t more widely recognized as a master of painting and drawing. The reputation is deserved not only because his canvases exhibit relentless, focused experimental drive and a command of expressive techniques belonging to more familiar European predecessors and contemporaries; or because the artist anticipated by decades the dynamism of Abstract Expressionism; or because his landscapes capture the aura of oceans and beaches with a fidelity that seems to defy account. More directly, all these aspects contribute to a breadth of feeling and a capacious

print May 2002

Richard Ballard

The oeuvre of Richard Ballad, a Paris-based British artist who’s spent considerable time in New York, can be read as a progression from lyric figurative expressionism to a pared-down, even brooding exploration of mostly natural forms. The tenor of his later paintings is hermetic, reflective of a meditative bent that comes to inhabit Ballard’s aesthetic in as passionate a manner as natural forms inhabit his early work. The thirty-seven watercolors in this retrospective of his paintings from the past two decades fall into six series. he earliest are airy and Matissian. Odalisque in a Dream, 1981,

print April 2002

Andrew Young

Andrew Young has the eye of a naturalist, to use a nineteenth-century term appropriate given the Victorian-looking patina of his paintings and collages. In his recent works, ten of which were on view here, he pastes meticulously handpainted images—birds, plants, flowers—on variously textured papers, interspersing them with monochrome Asian prints, postage stamps, and fragments of pages from Chinese newspapers and magazines.

At first glance Young's works can seem muted, almost timid. Yet even from a distance a discreetly animated quality competes with the flatness of the stylized graphic

print November 2001

“New York ca. 1975”

All bad art, Oscar Wilde once observed, is sincere. Yet it's hard to imagine a more sincere or necessary statement than Wilde's own De Profundis. When it comes to art's directly addressing life's dire exigencies—war, social inequity, prejudice, human misery in general—sincerity, like that others word, happens. How long such art can be of anything more than historical interest is another question. Judging from this show of work made in New York in the '70s, it's got at least another fifteen minutes.

Dan Graham's tentatively expressive Performance Audience Mirror, 1977, encapsulates one's

Tom Breidenbach