Page 13 - Rt Critic News Today

For over three decades, Pat Steir has been one of the leading painters in America. Her abstract waterfalls, with their rivulets of paint descending through cosmic spaces, discover unsuspected possibilities in the vocabulary of gestural abstraction, and reveal a profound spiritual dimension to contemporary art.

Renowned for his trademark figurative portraits, Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984) showcases Black joy and resilience in his works—leveraging finger-painting techniques to depict his subjects’ gazes and interior lives.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

I often do some of the writing in bed. The house finally quiet. Grandbaby asleep, Max’s murderous mewling on pause, laptops muted. A state of unresisting yet restive somnolence passes through me. I‘m both dead tired and buoyed up by the poem that’s coming my way.

For Danish viewers familiar with Raben Davidsen’s dreamlike paintings, the somber mood of this exhibition will feel unexpected. It is the most comprehensive exhibition of Raben Davidsen’s career to date and the first time she has shown a number of early works that were previously hidden in a studio drawer.

In this rich, dense, and compact show, Mel Kendrick focuses on his generally solid, large, puzzle-like sculptures, most in his current signature tones of yellow and black, creating a dynamic continual exchange with scribbled surface-markings playing in contradistinction to weighty, muscular structures.

This exhibition is much more than the sum of its parts. Entering Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery to experience (or, in a couple of cases, re-experience) twenty-seven works produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1982 and 1984 in Venice, California—reunited not too far east of where they were made, and even less west of where they were first shown—was not what I had anticipated.

The Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral first made his presence resonate around three decades ago, with a sequence of naked guitar extensions, durational pieces that suspended themselves somewhere across the ambient music spectrum.

Dimly remembered in the United States, the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1984–85 was a pivotal ordeal in Britain. This updated edition offers an incredible range of materials against forgetting the visual culture from the National Union of Mineworkers strike.