Painting has been around for a while, haven’t you heard? So it’s no surprise when a new show can set off a flurry of historical associations and still appear to be of its own time. Jon Pestoni’s exhibition of recent abstract paintings at Shane Campbell gallery does just that. Pestoni’s paintings bare a superficial resemblance to work by Gehard Richter. The vertical and horizontal movement[…..]

The leering white faces watch from the walls. They follow you from room to room, vacant eyes staring out from behind their grotesque masks. Though the lower part of their jaws are missing—unhinged—their slit-like eyes and upturned mouths indicate that the figures are consumed with mirth. We see the same white mask over and over, but from various angles: on its side, in three-quarter profile,[…..]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[…..]

It may take a second to see the sex. Ty Ennis’s show at Nationale this month consists of petite paintings featuring prominent textile patterns, done with the gentlest touch. Look a second longer and you notice the erotic: porn dvds, romance novels, a vaginal oyster. The paintings are mostly still lifes, and even though there’s sex, they’re not sexy (and not meant to be). They’re[…..]

Madame Oktopus is both the name of Maryna Baranovska’s solo exhibition at AJL Art in Berlin and her folk-alter-ego.  The title painting looms large over the exhibition space on Potsdamerstr. and alludes to the entire show’s genesis; a collection of paintings birthed with thick impasto confidence.  Like a lot of Baranovska’s works, Madame Oktopus, occupies the strange and cool split between narrative construction and painterly[…..]

This, and then. It’s the title of Matt Phillips’ latest exhibition and a useful shorthand for the mental quick march a viewer undergoes when observing his work. Through his abstract oil and acrylic paintings, Phillips plays with color, form, and volume—the building blocks of our artistic experience—to create dynamic, shifting spatial relationships. His canvases evoke, simultaneously, the calm beauty of the natural world, the randomness[…..]

Through his refreshing lack of self-seriousness or sanctimony, Ragnar Kjartansson has cut a jagged, joyful figure on the contemporary art scene. Indeed, with solo exhibitions in Boston and New York, the artist has recently been favored with the art world’s fickle attentions and is having something of a well-deserved moment. Ragnar Kjartansson, “The End–Venice,” 2009. Performance view. Venice, June 2009. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring[…..]