Nora Griffin
is an artist based in New York.
Werner Kramarsky and the Art of Collecting
By Nora Griffin“Collecting is a little bit like making love. You don’t know who your perfect partner is going to be. And you really don’t make a choice that way.”
Nyehaus becomes Indica
By Nora GriffinTo find Nyehaus, an elegant “project space” elusively located on the eighth floor of the National Arts Club, is tantamount to time travel.
Ruth Root
By Nora GriffinFrom afar Ruth Root’s painting is not easily recognizable as painting. Its slick surface calls to mind metal, plastic, or some unknown medium of the future. Ultra thin, brightly colored, variably shaped aluminum set flush against the gallery wall creates the impression of an object naturally merging with the wall space.
Stephanie Campos, Lady Shadow: Grid Machine
By Nora GriffinThe eight paintings in Stephanie Campos’ solo debut at Anna Kustera are at once rough and tumble objects and elegant meditations on modernism’s romance with the sublimity of the square.
TOMER ALUF Thirteen
By Nora GriffinIt’s important to remember that, unlike in life, no one gets hurt on the stage of painting. Some artists choose to reveal the scaffolding, lights, and dark box of this stage, while others conceal it as best they can. Tomer Aluf belongs in the first category: his paintings present a wide-open and generous stage, dandified with a touch of black magic.
Richard Aldrich
By Nora GriffinRichard Aldrich’s solo exhibit of twenty paintings at Bortolami presents a duel between the artist’s heavy sensibility and a selection of light experiments in abstract painting.
Llyn Foulkes
By Nora GriffinThe cartoon-serious urgency of titles such as “I Got a Job to Do” and “You Would Not Listen When I Told You,” are a welcome invitation into the world of a radically fresh 73-year-old painter, who is not as well-known as he should be on the East Coast.
Reflections on Philip Guston
Philip Guston: Burning the Midnight Oil
By Nora Griffin
Being in a room full of Philip Guston’s paintings is like time traveling—back to both the artist’s own era in which the work was made, and to my first attempts to make abstract work.
Entre Chien et Loup
By Nora GriffinNew York’s fall art season is in full swing and you would never know that our country is on the precipice of an historic presidential election. Kent Gallery’s current exhibition, Entre Chien et Loup (“between dog and wolf”), gives itself fully to this crepuscular moment in American politics.
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Surface Conditions
By Nora GriffinThe rigor of his work comes from an internal life, but the materials are never subjugated to this private world, rather they are entwined together, like a perfect marriage of differences
MARY WEATHERFORD Red Hook
By Nora GriffinPainters tell themselves stories in order to keep painting. In the case of Mary Weatherford, a Los Angeles-based artist, the stories are connected to specific places and her visual memories of them.
CLARE GRILL Touch’d Lustre
By Nora GriffinIt might seem counter-intuitive to begin a review of an abstract painting show by discussing realism. Especially now, when abstract painting is everywhere, from the Museum of Modern Art’s contentious survey The Forever Now, to artist-run spaces in Brooklyn, and the white cube galleries of the Lower East Side.
CORA COHEN The Responsibility of Forms
By Nora GriffinLanguage is integral to painting’s structure. Of all the art forms, painting is at once the most archaic and the most supremely socialized—it comes to us through centuries of babbling dialogue, entrenched in history and myth, and resplendent with references to other paintings and the civilizations that grew around them.
Language Regained
By Nora GriffinMarcel Cohen’s In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura, translated by poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein, is a memoir that meditates on the possibility of a personal and historical recovery through the act of translation.
“Life is Short, Reading is Long”
By Nora GriffinIn the early 1960’s Milan Kundera, a recent émigré from Czechoslovakia living as an exiled intellectual in Paris, discovers first hand the inescapable tidal force literature exerts over national consciousness and personal identity.
The Songs Are My Lexicon
By Nora GriffinStudio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, edited by Benjamin Hedin, is a collection of literary and journalistic essays, poems, and speeches by Dylan scholars, rock critics and connoisseurs. Like the beat paperbacks and pocketbook existentialism collections that Dylan might have carried with him as a young escapee to New York, Studio A is a portable key to a secret world, not dark yet but getting there.
To Live in a Culture
By Nora GriffinA portrait emerges from a collage of one-liners and innuendoes of the author as a young intellectual with bohemian leanings.
The Death of the Subject
By Nora Griffin“The only language that can be called ‘language’ without qualification is the language of natural reality.” —Pasolini
Andy Warhol Silver Screen
By Nora GriffinAndy Warhol’s fear of death as “the most embarrassing thing that can happen to you,” appears to be unfounded in the wake of Ric Burns’ operatic four-hour film.
A TRIBUTE TO SABRINA SEELIG (1984–2007)
By Phong Bui, David Varno, Nora Griffin, and Erin DurantOne could describe Sabrina to those who never met her as a J.D Salinger character, a brilliant precocious individual. A true New Yorker who loved the city and its people unequivocally, with an enormous appetite for life, she directed her energy to describing her adopted home.
