Carol Stewart, "All My Stuff," oil on paper on board
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Gallery KH’s show groups together three women artists whose oil paintings toe the line between new ways of seeing still life and warmed-over homages to Impressionism. Carol Stewart’s work is the most absorbing, where surfaces are so saturated with color and texture that they seem to be decomposing themselves as much as the wilted flowers they depict (in contrast to sturdy glassware and Diet Coke cans that prop them up). This corporeality is balanced by kaleidoscopic plays of light through the glass containers that bring to her work a strange and paradoxical sense of heavy flotation. Mingonette Yin Cheng’s geometric paintings are studies in flatness, where dull origami swans compare themselves to ordered, shadowless flowers against swathes of triangles and sweeps of thick striped paints. More often than not, Cheng’s paintings seem to be unfinished, blocked-out layers of future still lifes. Honore Lee’s studies of blue bowls are the least compelling of the group, with the kind of antiqued texture work on both bowls and backgrounds that immediately calls to mind the patina-effect murals that a Starbucks would present as a sign of mass-made authenticity. (Monica Westin)
In Orbit: A Chicago Aesthetic Emerges in NYC Group Show As the kitchen appliance referenced in the exhibition title signals, these artists seem to share an interest in—and perhaps anxiety about—domestic spaces and the rituals that occur there.
Excavated Images: A Review of “Life Against Itself” at Patron For the better part of a decade, the L.A.-based artist has used a variety of bladed tools to make her signature alla prima monochromatic gestural abstractions. In the last year, however, the hand has cut off the knife.
Symbols of Life: A Review of Theaster Gates at the New Museum in New York City Gates unites his artistic beginnings as a ceramics sculptor with the impressive amount of objects that he has acquired as an archivist. Titled “Young Lords and Their Traces” it follows the lineage of his artistic and archival practice through multiple times and histories.
