Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Judy Pfaff‘s first solo exhibition in St. Louis since her exhibition Currents 41 at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1989.

Wolf Kahn spends much of his summer sketching in pastel in and around Brattleboro, Vermont, later refining the sketches in his hilltop studio. BMAC is honored to present a portion of his summer 2011 artistic production.

Pastel is Kahn’s generative medium. I use the term generative not to imply that his pastels are sketches for paintings — though they may be. Rather, the mark a pastel stick makes, the way its powder sits on the page, its texture, its effects are the genesis of his painting style. Kahn has often referred to his painting technique as scrubbing: he makes dry, quick lines, atop thinly layered veils of color, essentially transferring his touch with pastel to paint. His virtuosic handling of the medium he calls “dust on butterfly wings” informs and expands all his artistic endeavors.

Rebecca Campbell and Angela Ellsworth both spent their childhoods in Utah and within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Their different experiences and individual reactions to this specific context have inspired much of their mature work as artists. Multilayered and complex, their works touch on memory and nostalgia but are grounded in the present and the reinterpretation of their experiences as well as Mormon traditions and practices. This exhibition will include painting, sculpture and installations.

Doublespeak features artworks by an international roster of contemporary women artists who utilize strategies of layered or multiple meanings to address politically, sexually or socially difficult subject matter. This exhibition will examine feminine perspectives on politics, war and gender, including exploration of the role of women as authors, victims, bystanders, soldiers, commentators, and caretakers. Each of the artists in Doublespeak comes from a perspective of dual-identity in one way or another (in terms of culture, religion, sexual identity, etc.).

This is a chance to see a generous selection of McNeil's robust abstractions, mainly from the '60s. In each work, a surprisingly broad palette is applied in boldly brushed strokes and passages. The raucous figuration of the artist's later work is suggested-but here we understand the pure energy that would animate his later work.

click here : www.artinamericamagazine.com

The Directors of Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe mourn the passing of a true American visionary. Helen Frankenthaler's life and art produced a remarkable body of work that inspired an artistic movement and continues to inspire new generations of artists and viewers in her unique pursuit of truth and beauty. We will miss your grace and friendship but just need to look at your paintings to find the source of your spirit and the joy you have brought to us.

Will Ameringer
Miles McEnery
James Yohe

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Patrick Wilson in galleries 3 and 4. On view will be a range of new paintings in which Wilson continues to translate color and light into luminous and flawlessly calibrated abstractions. Wilson's technique is straightforward - using drywall blades, rollers and masking tape he moves color around in controlled areas. The resulting compositions are elaborately layered squares, rectangles and lines of stunning color and radiance. Alternating between surfaces where the paint has been rolled on and where translucent layers are being pulled repeatedly over the surface, Wilson crates a spectacle of great beauty, in which the painting alternately offers resistance to the eye or pulls the viewer into glowing fields of brilliant depth.

Throughout her life, Nancy Graves (1939 -1995) had a long relationship with Texas, and Houston in particular, so it is with great pride and pleasure that Texas Gallery brings her work back to Houston in an exhibition of both paintings and sculptures from a major period in her career. In cooperation with The Nancy Graves Foundation, Texas Gallery will exhibit a selected group of paintings and cast bronze sculptures from the 1980s from September 8 through October 29, 2011. Rarely has any artist been able to meld the formal concerns and mediums of painting and sculpture into seamless harmony in the manner of Nancy Graves.

15 July - 16 October 2011

This exhibition will focus on Provincetown's legacy as an art colony, and will cover over 100 artists from Charles W. Hawthorne's founding of the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899 to the present day. This will be the largest and most comprehensive survey of the art colony completed in over 40 years.

NEW PALTZ – The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Saturday, October 15. The Dorsky first opened to the public in April 2001 and was officially dedicated on October 20, 2001.

The events of next weekend will honor past Hudson Valley Master artists Lesley Dill, Robert Morris, Don Nice, Judy Pfaff and Carolee Schneemann.

click here : http://www.midhudsonnews.com

This two-person exhibition is the culmination of an unfolding visual dialogue between artists Iva Gueorguieva and Julie Weitz, as each considers the relationship between time, body and painting. In this exchange of influence, Gueorguieva takes on Weitz's reoccurring theme of the mask and existentially rich nature of the reflection, and Weitz adapts Gueorguieva's implied figuration and propensity for vertical structure. The two artists encounter each other in their insistence on the body as both subject and field, and their consideration of time in the experience of looking.

Be among the first to view the new exhibit Wolf Kahn: Brattleboro Pastels, featuring new work created this summer in southern Vermont by one of America’s most influential and admired landscape artists. Kahn will be on hand to sign books, limited-edition prints, catalogues, posters, and more. Cash bar and light refreshments provided.

click here : www.brattleboromuseum.org

Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974) generates a sense of frenetic activity in each of her expansive compositions. The 15 large-scale paintings at Ameringer McEnery Yohe and nine works on paper at Bravin Lee Programs constituted the Bulgarian-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s New York solo debut. Produced in the past two years, the works feature flying trajectories and curving eruptions of line and color that create a sense of depth and movement. Her spaces are as whirlpool-like and active as those of Julie Mehretu, but her cascading forms share the physicality of Matta’s fanciful paintings. With her deft handling of multiple techniques and distinctive use of color, Gueorguieva is consistent but not repetitive.

Throughout the history of Modernism, the reputations of many painters have become known through their association with groups of like-minded individuals. Some of these associations are casual while others become definitive movements involving exhibitions and critical dialogues, at times using a manifesto or style of presentation as a means to communicate their aesthetic or to reinforce their social, political, and conceptual aspirations. Art movements have a temporal role in the history of art. They exist for a relatively short duration before members spin off in other directions.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents "The Influentials," an exhibition featuring distinguished female alumni of the College and the diverse group of artists who have influenced their practice. "The Influentials" is both an investigation into the creative lineage between contemporary artists and a dialogue between mentors and mentees that crosses generations, gender and media. The exhibition is co-curated by independent curator Amy Smith-Stewart adn SVA Director of Development and Alumni Affairs Carrie Lincourt.

This exhibition is a major survey of photrealism art from the collection of author and collector Louis K. Miesel who coined the term "photorealism" in 1969.

The hard-edge abstractions of the painter Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009), who began his career in Los Angeles and later moved to New Mexico, have never enjoyed much of a New York presence. They were last seen in bulk here in a two-person exhibition at Artists Space in 1987, a year after the artist’s only New York gallery show and more than 20 years after his rare inclusion in a New York museum show: the Op-Art-centric “Responsive Eye” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965.

Featuring works by Suzanne Caporael

click here : www.kemperart.org

Bad to the bone. That's us. Badness permeates our culture. It's the party crasher no one invited but everybody is secretly glad showed up. Because goodliness has always been boring and being bad can be cool. It comes in many guises: Über-badass bikers, mischievous children, ham actors, hungry wolves, politicians, Blaxploitation heroes, fashion choices, gestures, cigarettes and omens. Things get interesting when they go bad.

It's a bad, bad, bad, bad world—and it's ours.

click here : www.annakustera.com

Photorealism does not especially intrigue me, but in Patrick Lee's work, the technique is just the starting point for further revelations. Lee's graphite portraits of men are meticulous down to the very pores that sprout whiskers. The figures are set in a style reminiscent of the early 1900s, with heads floating in a limbo of whiteness, and I am reminded of the decades old black and white photos of my grandmother's family. Yet these portraits are startling contemporary insights into the society of men. Bald heads, scars, tattoos and ethnically diverse, these men virtually wear the stories of their lives on their necks, faces, and heads. In a culture where youth is trumpeted no matter the class or color of the individual, it's an interesting relief to see men, instead of kids, depicted here. These are men who clearly have lived lives of intensity and peril and are part of a society that signals their wounds with physical visuals.

Kahn works a canvas with the relentlessness of the rising tide. Several times during a visit to his studio, I would become enamored by a finished and already framed painting, only to have Kahn point at a certain spot in it that, to his mind, required more yellow there, or a more intense blue here. His painting is always incomplete—another precious contribution of sensibility art to this packaged culture of ours. Can you imagine Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons obsessing about a square inch of one of the large concoctions they have others illustrate from their photoshop compositions?

"Patrick Lee’s gorgeous portraits of tough young men are great works of art because they entice you to imagine what it might be like to live in someone else’s skin."

Three recent exhibitions in the New York area offered an opportunity to assess the career of the late Spanish-born Abstract Expressionist Esteban Vicente (1903-2001).

Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell called paper the most “sympathetic of all painting surfaces,” remarking that “it’s a struggle to get a canvas to have the beautiful surface that paper, by nature, already has.”

Western Project is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Patrick Lee. After a successful show in New York last year, the artist will present seven recent large scale drawings and a new video project.

An exhibition that explores what family life can provide to creative professionals. While having both a family and a productive practice is nothing new, the trend of honoring the synthesis of the two is a current phenomenon.

click here : www.griffinla.com

Wolf Kahn’s recent paintings, continuing his long engagement with rural New England as fodder and muse, still manage to startle and delight.

Featuring works by Iva Gueorguieva

click here : www.bravinlee.com

The Portland Art Museum's sprawling new exhibition, "Riches of a City: Portland Collects," announces its intention the moment you walk in the door: It's about the warmth and pleasures of domestic life -- if not always in the art itself, at least in where it comes from. - Bob Hicks

click here : www.huffingtonpost.com

There were just five George McNeil paintings in Perlow’s tiny space this winter, but even this small number made me wishfor a full-on museum exhibition of this underknown artist.

Nancy Graves: A Memorial Exhibition brings together seven works from the Art Center’s permanent collection by the artist Nancy Graves.

Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente will feature approximately 80 of the artist’s works, both collages and polychrome sculptures, which Vicente referred to as divertimientos or juegos, (“toys” in English). Vicente’s “toys” display his thorough understanding of Cubism, Constructivism and assemblage. Together, this group of works will reveal interesting facets of the career of this accomplished, if unassuming, artist.

Through a distinguished career that stretches back to the 1970s, she has exhibited internationally and received many prestigious awards—including a MacArthur Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Pfaff has also been strongly dedicated to education in the arts.

Updating the tenets of that short-lived movement for the current era, Iva Gueorguieva’s recent paintings at Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe (“A Stitch in Graft”)—one of two concurrent shows for the Bulgarian-born artist—produce similar spellbinding effects.

Artists tell the story of a charismatic teacher and his ideas in Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann by Tina Dickey, recently released by Trillistar Books. The author will travel to New York in early May for two book signings: on May 3 at 8pm, a signing at Spoonbill & Sugartown Books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and on May 5 from 5-7pm, a Cinco de Mayo signing at Ameringer McEnery Yohe in Chelsea.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has actively collected drawings for nearly a century, acquiring works of outstanding quality by many of the world's most prominent artists.

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is pleased to present the exhibition Judy Pfaff: Falk Visiting Artist. The internationally renowned artist is one of the pioneers of installation art, which is work that is site-specific and three-dimensional. Since the 1970s, she has been on the forefront of combining aspects of sculpture, painting, and architecture to form dynamic works that transcend aesthetic boundaries.

Our times demand that we embrace paradox. In response, instead of parsing out the incompatible, my experiment is the opposite. I seek the radiant, the abject, deliverance and damage in concert. These paintings are a manifesto for rapture, in spite of, or even in debt to, the abyss.

On view through April 10, the exhibit highlights an impressive collection of contemporary works from a wide variety of artists collected by the Golds for more than 30 years. Like many high-profile Los Angeles-based collectors — such as Edythe and Eli Broad or Lynda and Stewart Resnick — the Golds’ collection demonstrates an acute sense of style, taste and artistic understanding.

Rebecca Campbell’s new paintings are looser and juicier and far more beautiful than anything she has made since she began exhibiting her haunting works in Los Angeles 10 years ago. They’re also stranger and scarier than anything else being made today — despite, and because of, their generally benign subjects: pretty girls, gorgeous rainbows and sublime fireworks.

New York-based Caporael is an inveterate road tripper (having covered some 30,000 miles in her lifetime), and she used her most recent cross-country excursion as the basis for the 12 paintings on display here (all 2009 or ’10). Despite their highly abstract forms, the canvases, some of them fairly substantial in scale (the largest are 60 inches tall) and many with thickly painted surfaces, manage to convey Caporael’s journeys in a way that feels as fresh and honest as a lap-held diary.

In Michael Reafsnyder’s joyously frenzied paintings, each rectangular picture, with its layers of drips, swirls, daubs, and arcs, in every hue imaginable, was also a map of its own creation. Together with his cacophonous multicolored, biomorphic ceramic sculptures, these works seemed primarily designed to energize their audiences. For his showy topography, Reafsnyder used a variety of application methods: spreading the paint with a flat edge, allowing it to drip from above, applying it directly from the tube, touching it with his hand (or perhaps his arm), or, while the paint was still sticky, lifting it off the surface. The lush, thick surfaces put one in mind of cake frosting as much as they did Abstract Expressionism. Arguably Gerhard Richter’s spirit was being channeled—and challenged—as was Jackson Pollock’s.

The palette of Liat Yossifor's new paintings is calm, cool and collected. Soothing grays predominate, ranging from whisper-soft tints as delicate as a mourning dove's feathers to steely shades that would be at home on a battleship.

Manet was sort of a dandy, so I don’t know what he could have possibly known about the reality of being a ragpicker or homeless person. This is a very outside-in look at a subject. But for me what’s really compelling is that there’s a tiny still-life in the left-hand corner: a painting within the painting. You can make out a shard of glass, a lemon peel, a bit of garbage — but it looks like he’s only touched the canvas a few times.

“Esteban Vicente: Portrait of the Artist,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, starts with one artist, but quickly — and thankfully — opens up into one of these broader, more inclusive chapters. Vicente (1903-2001), a Spanish-born artist who lived most of his life in New York, was best known for his collages, and a big red abstract-floral one greets visitors at the entrance. A watercolor by his contemporary Philip Pavia, “Freefall No. 2” from 1959, hangs nearby, however, turning the installation immediately into a dialogue.

“Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell had a lifelong obsession with Irish novelist James Joyce. In 1948, Motherwell painted The Homely Protestant after opening a copy of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and randomly placing his finger on a page to select the title for the painting.

George McNeil was not among the most well known abstract expressionist painters, but he was in the thick of it in the 1940s and 1950s, showing his brash, bright, gushing abstractions alongside work by de Kooning and Pollock. In the late 1950s, as the movement sputtered out, McNeil began incorporating the figure into his paintings. “TRANS/FIGURE/ATION’’ at ACME Fine Art traces McNeil’s evolution as a figure painter through the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Angles Gallery is pleased to present AUGMN, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Bulgarian-born Iva Gueorguieva.

Nouns and adjectives go a long way to describe works of art, but the turbulence within Iva Gueorguieva's paintings demands verbs -- lots of verbs. Shapes billow, pulse and scatter; lines thrust and plummet; colors collide, dissolve, shriek and sigh. The paintings engulf the body. They send the eye skittering.

Judy Pfaff, who once wowed the art world with her formally and spatially inventive installation art, has recently turned her attention to paper. Her newest pieces, shown here, exist in box-like metal frames defining a narrow band of space—maybe five inches deep. Viewers should not let the works’ apparent flowery “decorativeness” dissuade them from inspecting all that is happening within this shallow space. Pfaff still has an uncanny grasp of spatial complexities. The details in these works provide sustenance for eyes starved of unabashed beauty. It’s as if she were compressing a gallery’s worth of glorious installation art into a confined space.