If Bill Jensen weren’t capable of making such awful paintings, his good ones wouldn’t be worth taking so seriously. His improvisatory method is inherently hit-or-miss. His scraped and scarred canvases often fail to distinguish between the grace note and the heavy hand.
Case in point: the forbiddingly dark canvases in the introductory gallery of Cheim Read More
The more Philip Pearlstein keeps on doing what he does—painting dispassionate, starkly cropped studio set-ups pairing folk art with naked, usually female models—the more the usual complaints apply. It’s equally true, though, that the more he keeps on keeping on, the more unguarded and eccentric he becomes.
His recent efforts at the Betty Cuningham Gallery Read More
Perhaps it’s the long-dormant Rolling Stones fan buried within the recesses of my psyche, but the title of Betty Cuningham’s summer-group exhibition rankles: Paint It With Black? Come on—who isn’t familiar with “Paint It Black,” as raucous an avowal of nihilism as ever blared its way through an AM radio? If curator Phong Bui, publisher Read More
There’s a wonderful lesson in scale to be learned from Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past , an exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center, and it can be found at the bottom of a cup (or kylix , to use its proper name) dating from around 460 B.C. Read More
Childhood in Ancient Greece
Rare and Beautiful Glimpses
There’s a wonderful lesson in scale to be learned from Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past , an exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center, and it can be found at the bottom of a cup (or kylix , to Read More
Bill Jensen is one of our most interesting-and inconsistent-painters. After looking at his recent pictures at the Mary Boone Gallery, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s interesting precisely because he’s inconsistent. Over the years, his landscape-based abstractions have zigzagged between extremes: between the lumbering and the graceful, the undercooked and the right-on, the self-conscious Read More
What a difference a month makes. From mid-January through mid-February, the Danese Gallery mounted an overview of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture titled Abstract Redux . On the evening of Valentine’s Day, Danese opened its current exhibition. Titled Fei Fei Drawings , it features the recent works on paper of Bill Jensen, the American abstract Read More
Bill Jensen currently has an exhibition of his paintings at the Chelsea branch of the Mary Boone Gallery. Or, to pin down the billing more precisely, Ms. Boone is currently exhibiting Mr. Jensen’s paintings. The renowned dealer’s new gallery on West 24th Street it’s been open a few months now is typically Boone-ian and then Read More
