I used to associate Jonathan Lasker’s impasto loops with the singer Regina’s twisty hair wraps in the music video for her 1986 hit single, “Baby Love.” Lasker’s 1980s paintings, like…
Since his death, a cult has grown up around the figure of Robert Smithson (1938–73), one that surrounds the artist and his work with an aura of purism. This is too bad, because what is most…
Mark Manders’s work makes a good argument for banishing the term “contemporary.” It’s a silly term. Unlike “modern,” which projected futures for a range of now-failed ideologies and left its…
Virginia Woolf called George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Sometimes I apply this to paintings. I look at a painting show and ask myself…
Laurie Simmons, Jerry Saltz, Xu Bing, and other art insiders took shelf portraits for us
Since the mid-1980's, Matthew Weinstein's work has consistently meditated on the terrifying and absurd experience of death. The artist's drawings and paintings from the mid 1990's feature skeletons se…