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David Ebony
David Ebony is a contributing editor of Art in America. He is also the author of monthly columns for Yale University Press online, and Artnet News.
Beatriz Milhazes: Mistura Sagrada
By David EbonyIn this, her first show at Pace, the Rio de Janeiro-based, Brazilian artist presented ten large-scale, colorful abstract paintings (up to approximately 8 by 10 feet), on the gallery’s second floor, plus an immense chandelier-like hanging sculpture displayed separately in the light-filled space on the seventh floor.
Francine Tint: Life in Action
By David EbonyMostly large canvases (up to 6 by 10 feet) painted within the past three years, in the midst of the pandemic, the works on view in Francine Tint: Life in Action appear as luminous and effervescent as any she has made. But within the parameters of the visual vocabulary she has established over decades, Tint reveals a highly nuanced range of emotional states—from exuberantly euphoric to introspectively pensive.
Alyson Shotz: Alloys of Moonlight
By David EbonyEncountering the eight recent abstract, painted folded-metal wall reliefs in Alyson Shotz’s luminous show, Alloys of Moonlight, I thought of Gilles Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. “The infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside,” Deleuze remarks in his study of folds as an infinite weaving of time and space in Baroque art. “Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter, each one on its own side.” With the nuanced spatial play in these works—of a façade and an enclosure, outside and inside—Shotz seems to aim for a transcendent quality like the one Deleuze describes.
Annesta Le: Eternal Current
By David EbonyIn this evocative exhibition, Le explores the phenomena of water in motion: currents, rivulets, and intimate, cascading waterfalls, all imaginatively rendered in a series of four glowing blue neon wall reliefs from her “Fluid Form” series (2023), which protrude several inches into the gallery‘s main space. The exhibition’s viewing event title, Neon After Sunset, refers to the darkened room as it appears in the darkness of the evening, with the walls and floors painted wrought-iron black, effectively conveying the feeling of a nighttime reverie or a dream state.
Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than One
By David EbonyAndy Warhol once quipped in a 1962 interview with David Bourdon. “I think someone should see my paintings in person before he says they’re vacuous.” Indeed, Warhol’s work—or at least images of it—may seem overly familiar, but, in person, it never fails to impart a potent, almost visceral impact that does not come across in reproductions.
Ebony G. Patterson: to kiss a flower goodbye
By David EbonyBathed in subdued light, …to kiss a flower goodbye…, Ebony G. Patterson’s exhibition of three recent large-scale wall-hung assemblage works or “tapestries,” and two framed photo-collage pieces, sets a mood to summon nocturnal reveries. Optically sumptuous and texturally rich, the colorfully embroidered works feature clusters of long strands of pearlescent white beads that ooze from the top of these irregularly shaped, nearly ten-foot-tall compositions, and pile up on the floor.
Larry Poons: The Outerlands
By David EbonyIn a varied professional career that has had significant highs and lows, Poons’s passion and commitment to art was and is unwavering, as evidenced by the works in this show.
Jane Dickson: Promised Land
By David EbonyThe sex shops and porn theaters that pervaded the 42nd Street area in the 1970s and ’80s have long since yielded to the Disneyfication of Times Square. For Jane Dickson, however, images of these seedy places have continued to provide a potent source of visual stimulation as well as conceptual aspiration in an ongoing series that constitutes a penetrating critique of American values and social strata.
Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason
By David EbonyArtists, lovers, life-partners, art-world rivals, benefactors, and luminaries, Emily Mason (1932–2019) and Wolf Kahn (1927–2020) were all of these things—and more. Miles McEnery Gallery has devoted each of its two spaces to the first posthumous solo gallery exhibitions for the couple, who died within months of each other after more than sixty years of marriage.
Thomas Woodruff: Resurrection
By David EbonyFor the new series, he developed an eccentrically exaggerated hyper-illusionistic space, while rejecting the conventions of Natural History painting as well as “paleoart.” He aimed to imbue his dinosaurs with human aspirations and emotions.
Julian Schnabel: Self-Portraits of Others
By David EbonyMost of the twenty-five plate paintings by Julian Schnabel in this exhibition, produced between 2018-2020, were inspired by photographic sources and, especially, a cinematographic source—photo reproductions of well-known artworks, and particularly images of van Gogh paintings that appeared in the 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate.
John Ferren: From Paris to Springs
By David EbonyJohn Ferren’s extraordinary biography can sometimes overshadow his achievements as a painter. Born in Oregon in 1905, he spent some youthful years in the 1930s in Paris, where he befriended Gertrude Stein, and was embraced by the Parisian avant-garde.
KIMSOOJA
Works and Process
By David Ebony
To Breathe: Bottari, Kimsooja’s exhibition at the Korean Pavilion, was one of the most memorable presentations at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The Korean-born New York-based artist had the audacity to offer visitors an anechoic—or sensory deprivation—chamber off the main gallery of the pavilion, which served as an antidote to the sensory-overload that is the hallmark of most Biennale installations.
At the Speed of Light:
Larry Poons Paintings of the 1960s
Interview with the artist by David Ebony
The brightly colored, hard-edge dots and lozenge shapes that Larry Poons painted in the early 1960s, against expansive, monochrome grounds of contrasting tones, appear to dance on the surface, flicker and bounce, in primal rhythmic beats.
In Conversation
RICHARD VINE with David Ebony
An art-world murder mystery, SoHo Sins is the first novel from Richard Vine, Art in America’s Managing Editor and an expert in the field of contemporary Chinese art. SoHo Sins is a noir-style crime-story set in the New York art world of the late 1980s and early ’90s.
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