Page 47 - Rt Critic News Today

Ruth Miller presents a very personal language of viewing in this intricate exhibition, showing how differently drawing and painting express themselves when addressing the same subjects.

Instead of offering informative and substantial content, the shows tend to focus on sensational and superficial topics, which does a disservice to their listeners

Deborah Buck’s Into the Wild: To Crash is Divine at La Mama Galleria connects the thinking-through process of drawing to the loose shaping of crowds and identity. Buck’s work breaks down the boundaries between modes of cartooning and abstraction to operate as covert satire. Between her figurescapes and phase shifts of pastiche, Buck generates erased zones of gray that she then utilizes as an important formal resource. By revealing the trace and shadow of her expressive hand, she makes ...

Curating from her position as a Staten Island native fed up with being referred to as the “forgotten borough,” Melissa West is optimistic about the future of dance in the borough. She hopes to prove that dance happens on Staten Island and in the process create more local support for the form.

The Austrian artist Leopold Strobl has a straightforward way of working: he looks through the pictures in daily newspapers, selects a scene, cuts it out, mounts it on thicker paper, and then covers much of the surface in colored pencil and graphite.

In bright light shining three sculptures dominate the interior of the gallery. The bolt of lightning from the print has been cast in bronze, painted fluorescent yellow, and placed with two companions, each a unique shape. They are more than twenty feet tall.

Ramakrishnan’s body of work encompasses an oceanic scope, evoking the vastness of creation and the scope of deep time. Fourteen paintings, all created this year and ranging in size from manuscript-like tablets to wall-size tableaus, are animated by an interspecies theater of serpents, anemones, lions, tigers, trees of life, and more speculative bodies, all built up in transparent layers of jewel-toned oil paint.

Nobody ever applies for the title “visionary.” It is a title that can only be bestowed in a person’s life by the cognoscenti. In life, it is easier to attach the title “maverick” to someone who is misunderstood or controversial. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a visionary as “one that has foresight and imagination. One who finds unique opportunities. A leader that tries new ideas, activities, or processes with the ability to remain focused. Individuals ma...

As with many artists, the delicacy and subtlety of Lewis’s drawings are often overshadowed by the greater density, larger scale, and inevitably more potent tactility of his paintings. However, this show’s exclusive examination of the artist’s drawings (and paintings on paper) permits viewers to focus on the smaller field as well as on Lewis’s technical experimentation and virtuoso draftspersonship.

Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) and Bruce Conner (1933–2008) had that kind of telephone talk marathon a listener feels present at, despite time and place making such an experience impossible. It endures in its strangeness, having been imitated by a photograph of Conner’s telephone dial, to which Defeo responded by a sending of one of his body photos with the dial stuck on: about which he writes: “I had become the telephone.” But we hear it, savor it, and applaud Bruce Conner for m...