Contributed by Carol Diamond / Admired and respected by her artistic community, beloved by friends and family, Lynn Kotula passed away in February 2021, after living with stage IV cancer for more than six years. The following is a 2022 catalogue essay written by John Goodrich on the occasion of “Lynn Kotula: A Life in Painting 1984–2020,” her final exhibition at Bowery Gallery.
The Blind Swimmer: Gordon Grant Fraser (December 2, 1975 – November 1, 2020)Two Coats of Paint has recently learned of the death of Gordon Fraser, a talented artist and art blogger who penned The Blind Swimmer, of a heart attack after undergoing a series of treatments for colon cancer.
Bushwick’s Tim GowanEven though making art is often an experience that happens in the solitude of one’s studio, it rarely occurs in a vacuum. Artists rely on each other for support, reinforcement, inspiration, and challenge, forming communities to avoid feeling like fish out of water in this world. Tim Gowan was one […]
Siri Berg: A life in colorSiri Berg, 98, died April 8, 2020 in her home, in New York City. Born in 1921, in Stockholm, Sweden, Ms. Berg was an accomplished painter and artist of mixed-media who enjoyed a late-career renaissance in her final two decades. In recent years, her work was the subject of several […]
April Kingsley (1941-2023): Art Historian, Critic, and CuratorWritten by Tom Recchio of The Provincetown Independent / An art historian, curator, scholar, and critic, April Kingsley of Wellfleet and Truro lived her life amidst art. “I wouldn’t go anyplace if there wasn’t art to see,” she once said. She explored American Abstract Expressionism, including the work of African-American […]
Cora Cohen (1943-2023)New York-based painter Cora Cohen died at a hospice in Brooklyn on June 22 at the age of 79. As Barry Schwabsky wrote in ArtForum International reviewing her 2022 exhibition at Morgan Presents, she was “one of the most underrated painters in New York.”
Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back.
Contributed by Anna Gregor / Ian Myers’ paintings blur the lines between art, nature, and miracle, asking what painting’s vocation is at a moment when anything can be art, nature is under threat, and miracles are unfathomable. His five paintings, on view in his solo show “immortal flub” at New Collectors Gallery, are obviously art. Rectangles do not occur in nature, nor do the white gallery walls on which his rectangular paintings hang. But these rectangles don’t act like windows that allow us to enter an illusionistic space, as we expect from mimetic paintings. Nor do they reveal the human hand or thought processes that we assume to be involved in making abstract work. They eschew the exhibitionist gesture of Abstract Expressionism, the clarity of hard-edge abstraction, and the planned step-by-step process of much contemporary abstraction.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.