“People from the village,” said David Hockney recently in The Smithsonian, “come up and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’” How did Hockney...
The title of Iva Gueorguieva’s show “Spill/Frame” seemed almost a naked admission of its strategies and ambition with a concomitant risk of crashing, careening failure. In almost all of the works on view there was both a willful, self-imposed notion of the edge or,...
In Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’s Subterranean Family (2013), a large woman crouches, her body sinking into the earth, weighed down by a patchwork of introspective self-images. One curls in a sphinx-like pose, her feline tail circling behind her back, as she clutches a...
“Speaking Tongues (The material of communication)” introduces Duane Paul's considerable talent and ability in the artist's first solo exhibition. The show’s 12 works (all 2013) are divided into three sections or “dialect clusters:” six works on paper, two...
The buzz around San Francisco’s new art hub—near the Design District along a stretch of Utah Street and nearby Potrero—resonates throughout Jack Fischer’s expansive new space. Its inaugural exhibition, “Years of Pretty,” is a mini-retrospective of SF-based Ward...
From the shaded parking lot, a stark beam of light shines through the loosely shut double doors of a nondescript white brick building. It is late morning, and the sun is already beginning to assert its presence as I approach the now-defunct Regen Projects gallery. It...
For me, Claude Monet stands between two of my favorite artists who played with the disintegration of the object rather than its creation: J.M.W. Turner and Anselm Kiefer. Turner’s objects sailed forth only to be obliterated by light as if they were Viking funeral...
With eight new oil-and-enamel paintings, Kirsten Everberg continues her practice of exploring filmic images as a means of exercising her interest in perception, memory and narrative. Visually, her paintings present an eerie absence. In Everberg’s hands, film scenes...
Rising to prominence in New York in the 1980s, Eric Fischl's dramatically composed, challenging works portrayed a steamy, unwholesome underbelly to suburbia—a vision of the nation's great middle class as throbbing, voyeuristic adolescents, impassive temptresses and...
Richard Jackson is a maniac with paint. His current retrospective is a testament to the gargantuan ambitions and massive amounts of energy he has displayed over a 40-plus-year career. The exhibition’s title, “Ain’t Painting a Pain,” is indicative of his commitment to...
Felicitously hung in the former drawing room of a 19th-century castellated Gothic Revival villa, Gaela Erwin’s exhibition of pastels reveals first a mastery of light that both sculpts and dissolves form, patterned after the dramatic innovations of Caravaggio. But far...
Duron Jackson gives us a key to decipher his Blackboard Paintings (2010-2012), the most compelling parts of his installation “Rumination,” the latest of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series. The wall text is that key, informing us that the enigmatic glyphs are...
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