The Medal of Arts award was initiated by Art in Embassies in 2013 to formally acknowledge artists who have played an exemplary role in advancing the U.S. Department of State's mission of promoting cultural diplomacy.

by Roger Catlin

Gene Davis spent his career in newsrooms from the Washington Daily News to United Press International to the Fredericksburg Freelance Star, and even served a stint as a New York Times copy boy.

And while he took up abstract painting in the 1940s as a hobby, and was featured in a few local shows, he was never successful enough to devote his full time to art until, after 35 years in journalism, he finally turned to it 1968.

by Janet Batet

Julio Larraz (Havana, 1944) is known for a distinctive, almost metaphysical approach to painting and composition. On the occasion of Made in USA, his recent exhibition at Miami’s Ascaso Gallery, Janet Batet pondered the enigmatic, inviting character of Larraz’s vision and his art.

Todd Hebert is a graduate of the University of North Dakota (BFA) and The Rhode Island School of Design (MFA).  His work has been featured in public museums and private galleries nationwide, including The Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, Pepperdine University, The Riverside Art Museum and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University.  A recent survey exhibition of Hebert’s work was mounted at the North Dakota Museum of Art and his work is included in numerous public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Frederick R. Weisman Collection.

Opening: Friday 11 November, 6 to 8pm

Artist's talk: Saturday 12 November, 12pm

Brightly colored stripes multiply in rhythmic repetitions across the surface of a painting by Gene Davis. Remarkably original when they first appeared in the 1960s, these paintings became the signature expression for one of the leading Color Field painters. With no more than a rectangular canvas and multicolor stripes, Davis created a richly varied body of work that looks as fresh today as it did when it first was shown. The large size of most of his canvases from the 1960s requires a viewer to consider the relationships and rhythms over time, more like a musical composition than the dynamic, colorful, pop art images that emerged at the same time.

We are pleased to announce that two paintings by Rod Penner are featured in the exhibition FOTOREALISMUS: 50 Jahre hyperrealistische Malerei (PHOTOREALISM: 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting), at Osthaus Museum Hagen in Hagen, Germany.

The exhibition Creation in Form and Color: Hans Hofmann is a collaborative project by the Berkeley Art Museum, the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California (BAMPFA), and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. It is based on a precise selection of approximately 60 paintings, watercolors, and drawings that span the artist’s entire career from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The show includes works on loan from the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as from prominent American and European museums and private collections. One of the exhibit’s particular goals is to examine Hans Hofmann before the backdrop of his European tradition in his role as an important artist and teacher of 20th century American modernism. Additionally, the show weighs his exploration of his experiences and influences in his chosen homeland of America, while simultaneously emphasizing his theories and work, which made him an especially significant artistic mediator between the continents. Despite his fundamental importance to the development of modern art in America—where prominent exhibitions were devoted to him during his lifetime—Hofmann remains less well known in Germany and Europe as a member of the Modernist avant-garde.

Sunday 6 November, 4 PM

195 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002

Please join 11R for a conversation between artists Douglas Melini and Brian Alfred with curator Daniel S. Palmer, on the occasion of Melini's current exhibition at the gallery, You Have To Peer Into The Sky To See The Stars.

by Cate McQuaid

We know painter Wolf Kahn for radiant colors and landscapes that are more about formal and tonal relationships than they are about place. But in the 1960s, Kahn dwelt in the shadows. His paintings from that period make up the last exhibition at modernist gallery ACME Fine Art, closing its doors after 15 years. Owners Jim Bennette and David Cowan will continue their art-consulting business.

Iva Gueorguieva in conversation with Dona Nelson at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

As a Hollywood special effects artist, Patrick Lee has worked on such films as "Armageddon" and "Day Before Tomorrow."

But perhaps his greatest illusion is when Lee picks up a graphite pencil and draws a face.

You can see Lee's mind-blowing photo-realistic portraits in the "Deadly Friends" exhibit now up at the Huntington Museum of Art as the internationally known and shown L.A.-based Lee is the Walter Gropius Master Artist in October.

The fortysomething Montana-born, and Minneapolis College of Art & Design educated artist speaks about his work during a free public presentation at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13.

Lee will stay up on the hill this weekend to present a three-day workshop at HMA titled "Drawing Realism" from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday, Oct. 14-16. Visit www.hmoa.org or call 304-529-2701 for workshop fee information or to register.

An exhibit of work by Lee continues on view at the Huntington Museum of Art through Dec. 30.

Stark Naked: Uncovering Bodies, Objects, and the Futility of Desire Curated by Robert Moeller Pop-up exhibit showing 37 artists in 6 curated spaces

With curated spaces by: J.R. Uretsky Franklin Evans Lillian P.H. Kology Sam Toabe Gabriel Sosa

EDDYSROOM is pleased to announce the opening of its eleventh show: Room With A View. Room With A View is a group show of landscape/nature-themed works. We are excited to include the works of Erik Parker, Hein Koh, Shara Hughes, Cody Hudson, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Hilary Baldwin, and Brian Alfred in the exhibition.

Isca is our seventh subject in a new SLICE Special Guest Series which introduces our readers to extraordinary, creative people ⎯ wherever we may find them.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders is an artist based in New York City. Her large scale mixed media oil paintings are found in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); Victoria and Albert Museum (London); and Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Isca’s solo exhibitions include Haunch of Venison, New York and London; John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Klüser, Munich; and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen. Her upcoming solo show will be at Ameringer Mcenery Yohe, New York in 2017. Isca has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Artsy, Art in Print, Modern Painters, Huffington Post, Artnet Magazine, ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, ARTFORUM, and Time Out New York. She graduated from Brown University with a double major in fine arts and mathematics. In 2001 Isca was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. When she’s not working, you can find her with her husband, the painter Sebastian Blanck, and their two sons. Isca lives and works in New York City’s East Village.

Hans Hofmann’s famous phrase “push and pull” is most often associated with his signature works of the 1950s and 1960s, in which bold color planes emerge from and recede into energetic surfaces of intersecting and overlapping shapes. The ideas and impulses behind this enduring term, however, took shape decades earlier, in his teachings, writings, and in his own paintings. In the late 1930s, in a series of widely attended lectures in Greenwich Village, Hofmann demonstrated how to “push a plane in the surface or to pull it from the surface” to create pictorial space. “We must create pictorial space,” he declared to audiences of avid young artists and critics, including Arshile Gorky, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg. Hofmann would later refine his definition of push and pull as “expanding and contracting forces...the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push.”

readingroomincolor” – a site-specific installation by Franklin Evans

American artist Franklin Evans will present a site-specific installation at CROSSROADS. His work is influenced by the architecture of the space, inspiring the form and space that he, in turn, will present to the viewer to engage with. Evans, who trained as a painter, is interested in materiality and incorporating paintings into an environment. His immersive works are built from amassed art supplies and materials found in his studio space—including artists’ tape adhered to the walls, floor and ceiling, bubble wrap, old newsprint, un-stretched canvases and press releases from gallery exhibitions.

I had a great conversation with American figurative artist Bo Bartlett. Bo’s paintings have a deep emotional and spiritual impact. He’s been painting for the last 40 years and it shows. Bo is highly revered and his work is collected around the world in private collections and museums.  This is a long conversation and as we got deeper into it Bo talked about his experience of life and death and the underlying philosophy of his work and life.

Rachel Beach, Lisa Beck, Nuno De Campos, Stacy Fisher, Rob Fischer, Sophia Flood, Halsey Hathaway, Andrew Prayzner, Oliver Jones, Matthias Neumann, Carolyn Salas, David Schafer, Greg Simsic, Richard Tinkler, Austin Thomas

Curated by Björn Meyer-Ebrecht

Opening Reception: Thursday, 29 September 2016, 7 - 10pm

Open during Bushwick Open Studios 2016: Saturday / Sunday, 1 - 2 October 2016, 12 - 7pm and by appointment

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht's Studio 1182 Flushing Avenue, 2nd floor, Brooklyn, NY 1123

by Leah Ollman

Amy Bennett makes paintings that call little attention to the elaborate process of their creation, but what may seem like conventional landscapes come with a back story that gives us far more to absorb and ponder than what’s visible on the wall.

For "Small Changes Every Day," her recent series at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Bennett started with an 8-by-8-foot hunk of plastic foam and built a model of an undisturbed patch of verdant terrain. She painted a portrait of the land as seen from above, a handsome Eden dotted with ponds and etched with streams.

Three currents merge and reconfigure in Julio Larraz’s work—as do the waters of rivers, clouds, and ice he often paints—and these are: still-life turned into theater, theater seizing the moment in rebellion against plot, and character defying its persona. The three currents together articulate this great artist’s enduring primary concern: the representation of mystery escaping resolution to become the hedonist’s enigma, an inexhaustible, celebratory insistence on the imagination’s life in the luminous moment.

WORKSHOP: 9am to 4pm, 14 Oct. – 16 Oct. 2016 PUBLIC PRESENTATION: Thursday, 13 Oct. 2016, 7pm EXHIBITION: 24 Sep. – 30 Dec. 2016

Drawing Realism"

During this workshop, Patrick Lee will share the specific techniques he uses to achieve a photorealistic look in the portraits he creates. He will teach other artists who are looking to accurately capture an individual or an object how to use pencil (graphite). Lee will explain his process, from approaching individuals on the street and photographing them to editing images and choosing what will hopefully be a compelling composition. In addition he will tell the stories behind his drawings in the gallery and help participants focus on how to pick subjects to draw. Drawings will be based on photographs the participants provide and will take shape over the three days of the workshop.

by Danielle Tcholakian

SOHO — Vesuvio Playground will double as an art gallery for the month of October, featuring a mural project by downtown-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders — and the help of more than 200 local kids.

The installation, entitled "Playground Parachutes," includes four large-scale murals that Greenfield-Sanders gridded into 72 square tiles printed in four basic colors: blue, pink, yellow and black.

Teaching artists at the Children's Music of the Arts (CMA) in Hudson Square took the tiles and helped more than 200 children fill them in with colored pencils, before returning them to Greenfield-Sanders so she could reassemble into four parachute images.

Amy Bennett's current exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery, entitled "Small Changes Every Day," is her first solo exhibition in four years. Featuring all new works, Bennett's dreamlike scenes depict a miniaturized world playing at reality.

Bennett designs and paints from miniature 3D models, allowing her total creative control of the scenes she imagines. She is able to manipulate composition, light, and vantage point, often in an attempt to simulate the inadequacies of memory, dreams, and the imagination.

ACME Fine Art is proud to announce the gallery’s Fall exhibition: WOLF KAHN: EARLY WORK.  The exhibition will focus on a single decade of Kahn’s early career, the 1960s. This was an important decade in which Kahn’s work garnered the critical acclaim that helped establish his trajectory towards becoming one of America’s favorite contemporary landscape painters. The exhibition will feature fifteen works—fourteen oil paintings and one pastel—that demonstrate Kahn’s artistic arc during this pivotal decade. Many of the canvases have not been exhibited since the year that they were created. The show will open on Friday, 30 September, and run through 26 November, with an opening reception held Friday, 7 October from 6:00 to 8:00 in the evening.

by Juliet Helmke

If not for rapidly rising Brooklyn rents, Amy Bennett’s last series of paintings might never have come to fruition. “Space- and money-wise, my husband and I felt pushed out,” the artist, who earned her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2002, explains. Hunting for a new place to call home, the painter found herself spending hours “just image-searching specific towns and looking down at them in Google maps.” By the time the couple and their young son decided on Cold Spring, in Upstate New York, she “had the impulse to build my own town.” But for Bennett, that meant doing so at 1:500 scale, or what she calls “Monopoly size.”

Green Below 14 and SmartSpaces present Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ Playground Parachutes, in partnership with the Children’s Museum of the Arts (“CMA”) and NYC Parks, opening at 10:30 a.m. on October 1, 2016 at Vesuvio Playground in SoHo (corner of Spring and Thompson Streets).

The New York-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders transforms old slides by scanning and gridding them, and then applying multiple layers of watercolor, colored pencil, or oil paint. The resulting painting blends photographic and painted elements to reimagine scenes of beach vacations or Nantucket outings. With fuzzy figures and muddled blues, her painted imagery evokes a nostalgic air that tugs at the viewer’s memory and perception. Balance Point will be Greenfield-Sanders first solo show at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

On the same block where Bo Bartlett’s first solo exhibition in New York opened 35 years ago, Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is giving audiences a sneak peek into the much anticipated Bo Bartlett Center, set to open in Columbus, Georgia next fall. Journals, preparatory drawings, and palettes piled high with miniature cliffs of oil paint are just a glimpse of what Bartlett has donated to his center. The mid-career retrospective also features his latest work, along with his cache of props and ephemera, many of which are dutifully rendered in the works themselves. These freshly executed pieces hold fast to Bartlett’s endearing style of Realism with a curious twist. He proudly carries on the American lineage of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Norman Rockwell, but there is an oddity about his works that creates psychological pause within the viewer, and sets him apart from the Realist tradition. In response, the term Magic Realism is being revived.

By Peter Plagens

What’s a realist painter to do? The skill of rendering on a flat canvas convincing portrayals of three-dimensional space containing objects and human figures is fairly common, especially in an age when photographic and digital aids are not only readily available, but—at least since the advent of Photorealist painting in the 1960s—immune from accusations of “cheating.” The problem for the hard-core figurative painter is how to stand out from the herd—how to give the viewer something more than the feeling of, “Wow, that looks so real.”

Bo Bartlett at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe by John Thornton

In 1934, a year after Hitler’s accession to power, the exiled German painter established his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, on Fifty-seventh Street. It went on to become the clearinghouse of the first internationally successful generation of American painters. In the five succulent early works here, painted in Provincetown and predating Hofmann’s more familiar paintings of solid blocks of color, you can see him infusing his European inheritance (specifically, the jarring non-local color of Fauvism) with American verve. A studio interior, from 1936, has the bright blues and violets of Matisse, but the orange pigment of a chest of drawers bleeds past its contours, onto the wall and the floor, prefiguring a combustible abstraction of 1944, whose uncontainable splatters offered a new model of creation.

Opening: Hans Hofmann at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

In a season dominated by group shows, here's a nice solo show of Hans Hofmann's work. Hofmann, the German-born and later New York-based artist, is best known for his abastract paintings that feature layered geometrical forms against non-figurative backgrounds. Having been one of Harold Rosenberg's favorites, he quickly achieved fame and went on to inspire many more. This show should be a nice, light survery of a big-name artist at a time when many other galleries have turned over their spaces to lesser-known artists.

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, 525 West 22nd Street, 6-8 p.m.

By Nina Azzarello

artist markus linnenbrink has installed a vibrant 40,000 square foot mural across the façade of miami‘s soon-to-be completed SLS brickell hotel and residences. best known for his signature ‘drip painting’ technique, linnenbrink has enlivened downtown’s monochromatic urban area with a colossal, chromatic landscape. commissioned by jorge m. pérez with the goal of giving the district a burst of color, the installation wraps the exterior of the architecture and sees vibrant stripes span from ground floor, to the building’s uppermost levels.

The Delaware Art Museum is pleased to present Truth & Vision: 21st Century Realism. On view October 22, 2016 – January 22, 2017, this exhibition surveys the state of representational painting at the beginning of the 21st century and features approximately 40 works by 20 contemporary realist artists from throughout the United States and Canada.

By John Seed

In early 1991, art critic Roberta Smith looked over Bo Bartlett’s painting God—a sweeping image of a black man, poised in front of a sweeping coastal horizon, wrapped in a quilt—and came slightly unglued. In her New York Times review of the exhibition she later wrote of the piece: “As consciousness raising, this is fairly simple-minded. As history painting, it’s idiotic.”

In the same column, Smith also dings Bartlett for his “conservative” artistic style (realism), dismissing his paintings as being “more trendy than timeless.” Smith’s comments, which generated a domino effect of subsequent negative reviews—by Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Kimmelman and others—re-shaped the arc of Bartlett’s career.

New York - Cara Gallery is pleased to present Relevant Notes, a collective exhibition that presents a dialogue between the work of 11 artists to explore the boundaries of disciplines among installation art, land art and architecture. Exhibiting in a wide variety of medias including installation, drawing, photography, painting and sculpture – each created over the past five decades - act as relevant notes to the testimony of the artists’ interpretation of the concept of human intervention. Studying their sustainability in the natural environment, these artists take the location and materials of their work into careful consideration using cultural, political and environmental histories to create art as a catalyst for change.

By John O’Hern

Andrew Wyeth wrote, “Art to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work. That’s my art.” Writing about Wyeth just after his death, Bo Bartlett called his friend “…a Zen master. He was a contemplative. Regarding the patience it takes to discover a painting, he would sit for hours looking; he said, ‘If you sit long enough, the life will appear.” He has called Wyeth’s ability to see “a lost art. We’re scared of seeing. If we were to see the mystery of what all this is…it’s very overwhelming for our little brain.” He suggests that if we could slow down, and look, “we could, perhaps, if we’re lucky, tap into the great mystery.”  

An exhibition, Omaggio a an Homage, of works by Julio Larraz at Contini Galleria d'Arte in Venice, Italy is on view from 18 June - 23 October 2016.

By Low Lai Chow

Now this is art that truly takes you places. Touted as "the world’s fastest art experience," the high-speed Genbi Shinkansen opened last month on the Jōetsu Shinkansen railway line.

By Chuck Williams

A portrait of a federal judge that Columbus artist Bo Bartlett worked on for almost two years was unveiled Thursday night in a Washington courtroom.

Following the success of the 2014 exhibition dedicated to the American hyperrealist sculptor Duane Hanson, the Museum of Ixelles presents PHOTOREALISM. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting. This exhibition highlights the generation of hyperrealist painters after the Second World War. In the aftermath of Pop Art, the hyperrealists portrayed and criticized the American consumer society in a fascinating semi-photographic style.

By Vanessa Borge

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – It’s about a bold burst of color in Brickell!

World famous artist Markus Linnenbrink is working on his largest mural ever in Brickell’s South Miami Avenue.

Presented by the New York Academy of Art, “WATER|BODIES” is co-curated by artist Eric Fischl and Academy President David Kratz. Generously sponsored by Cadogan Tate, “WATER|BODIES” presents paintings, photographs and sculptures by established and emerging artists with connections to both the East End and the New York Academy of Art. Life on the South Fork of Long Island is based on and intrinsically connected to the water, and this show explores water, bodies and the inevitable meeting of the two. The works in this exhibition depict the sea, the shore, the pool, sunbathers and the nude as a lively and expressive genre that interweaves themes of natural beauty and the nature of pleasure.

Over 30 artists are featured in the show, with works from newly minted Academy MFAs hanging alongside pieces by artists such as Ross Bleckner, Patrick Demarchelier, Eric Fischl, Ralph Gibson, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, April Gornik, Michael Halsband, Enoc Perez, and David Salle.

By Bridget Gleeson

Yunhee Min is a master colorist whose signature works—often featuring geometric color blocks in rainbow hues—have graced museums and galleries across the country. Her latest paintings continue that exploration of color, this time for a solo show at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, the New York gallery now representing the Korean-born artist.

Min refers to these new paintings as “movements.” Musical terminology is certainly appropriate, since her works are ethereal and fluid, even rhythmic, like variations on a theme.

By Dan Golden

Yunhee Min is an artist based in Los Angeles. She is interested in painting as foremost a studio practice, where hands-on engagement with the material and the activity of making take priority. Although she has explored the cultural, social, and historical dimensions of signification of color in her previous work, she is currently interested in the potentialities of color as pure sensation.

It's not impossible to master space and time, apparently. If you're artist Eric Green, all you need is some graphite and a nice set of colored pencils. Green's stunning Time Diptych and Mirrored Room series, on display at AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE Gallery through May 21, distort the rooms in his house in a scrupilous interrigation of his own reality.

In cooperation with the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthalle Bielefeld will present the exhibition Creation in Form and Color, dealing with the work of the German-born painter, Hans Hofmann. The exhibition opens at Kunsthalle Bielefeld on 5 Novemer 2016 and remains on view through 26 February 2017. It will travel to the Musee National d'histoire et d'art - Luxembourg and be on view from 28 September 2017 through 14 January 2018. A third venue for the exhibition will be announced. 

By Claire Voon

Japan’s major passenger railway company JR East has just launched what officials call “the world’s fastest art experience” with a traveling art gallery aboard one of its bullet trains, or shinkansen. Zipping at speeds up to 200 miles per hour, a train named “Genbi Shinkansen” on the Jōetsu Shinkansen line now holds a group exhibition of contemporary works by six Japanese artists, the Japanese collective Paramodel, and New York-based artist Brian Alfred.

By Bridget Gleeson

Compared to solo exhibitions, group shows can seem unfocused—the artists arbitrarily arranged, their works adhering, however loosely, to a central theme. Not so with “Dynamic Pictorial Models,” at 101/Exhibit in Los Angeles. The show, featuring pieces by four artists, was specifically and intentionally planned down to the last detail.

By Dan Piepenbring

Eric Green has a new exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe through May 21. Green’s two series, Time Diptych and Mirrored Room, use graphite grisaille layered with colored pencil and varnish to depict the almost imperceptible passage of time in various rooms in his home in Maine. “It is the amalgamation or comparison of the two images that creates the specific emotion, not each individual panel,” he wrote. “Gauging and balancing this convergence is everything.”

Eric Green’s current exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe consists of six works all of which are colored pencil drawings on board. The most striking moments occur in the mirrored works: each panel contains two identical renditions of the same space with the upper half (the first drawing) in an upright orientation while the lower part (second drawing) is rotated by 180 degrees to form a mirrored counterpart to the upper half. 

The Spanish-born artist Esteban Vicente, whose career spanned eight decades, seemingly did it all. Arriving in the U.S. in 1936, the artist was part of the first generation of the New York School Abstract Expressionists, held a teaching gig at Black Mountain College, and counted Willem de Kooning as a floor mate at his Tenth Street studio space.

By Patricia Ann Alvares

New York-based Portuguese artist Nuno de Campos created a series of portraits based on short stories and novels originating in Goa. This graphite on paper, titled, ‘Goans,’ currently on exhibit at MOG, represents one or more characters from each story. He recounts his fascinating discoveries to Café. 

David Allan Peters’ hallucinogenic paintings have a vibrant quality that is distinctly Californian. Inspired by the natural beauty of his West Coast home, the Cupertino native renders the area’s flora and neon haze into radiant, fractal-like patterns. At first, his midsized paintings on wood panels might appear to be composed of simple brushstrokes, but the reality of Peters’ process is much more complex.

By Alexander Keefe

One’s initial impression of Yunhee Min’s new work, an intervention of poured paint and fluorescent light onto two long, normally transparent vitrines installed in the lobby of the Equitable Life Building—an iconic if somewhat long-in-the-tooth skyscraper in Koreatown—depended a great deal on how (or when) one first came across it. If the lights happened to be switched off (as they were at regularly timed intervals), Luminaire Delirium (Equitable Life or soft machine), 2015, displayed a milky, matte opacity, obstructing or deflecting one’s view of the vitrines’ interiors with turbulent, tainted whites, shadowed by hints of darker, more vivid colors swimming just behind. But if the cases’ hidden fluorescent tubes were set aglow, those same soured, opaque whites blazed into translucency, revealing brilliant layers of liquid color, and transforming this patch of corporate interior into a minor phantasmagoria of stained glass: Viscous, chemical yellows bled into inky blue-blacks and absinthe green; shades of red suggested a continuum between maraschino syrup and stage blood.  

Inspired by Robert C. Jackson’s 2014 publication, Behind the Easel: The Unique Voices of 20 Contemporary Representational Painters, this exhibition surveys the state of realistic painting at the start of the 21st century. Indicative of this moment are two trends in representational painting–the depiction of the natural world and the creation of fantastic imaginings. Featuring artists from throughout the United States and Canada, including Steven Assael, Bo Bartlett, Debra Bermingham, Margaret Bowland, Paul Fenniak, Scott Fraser, Woody Gwyn, F. Scott Hess, Laurie Hogin, Robert C. Jackson, Alan Magee, Janet Monafo, John Moore, Charles Pfahl, Scott Prior, Stone Roberts, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Daniel Sprick, Will Wilson, and Jerome Witkin, Truth & Vision: 21st Century Realism reveals the contemporary developments in a mode of painting historically tied to the greater Brandywine Valley.

During March and April the George Adams Gallery will present “Differing Views,” a group exhibition featuring the work of five notable realist painters: Rackstraw Downes, Richard Estes, Yvonne Jacquette, Andrew Lenaghan, and Rod Penner. Each artist will be represented by multiple paintings including a new series of tondos by Lenaghan and four pastels by Jacquette.

101/EXHIBIT proudly presents Dynamic Pictorial Models, an exhibition featuring gallery artist Pedro Barbeito in collaboration with artists Lydia Dona, Fabian Marcaccio, and Franklin Evans. The opening will be held from 6-9pm on Saturday, March 12th at 8920 Melrose Ave, located on the corner of North Almont Drive, one block south of Santa Monica Blvd. A full-color catalog with essay entitled “New Models, Strange Tools” by New York-based poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein will accompany the exhibition.

By Graham McLean

With an ease and precision that comes only from a lifelong dedication to one’s craft, it is no wonder why so many consider Cuban born artist Julio Larraz to be one of the most important Latin American artists working today. Larraz creates monumental works of art that are majestic and refined, but still somehow accessible. His works, though painted naturalistically, are often highly imaginative, and this duality is what draws the viewer in.

Larraz has had an impressive career dating back to the 1960s when he drew political caricatures for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Vogue Magazine, and other publications. He is the recipient of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his work can be found in museums, galleries, and private collections all across the globe. I had the great honor of speaking with Larraz about his work and what he thinks his art means.

Rod Penner's paintings to be featured in "Photorealism. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting" at the Kumu Art Museum in Estonia.

A solo exhibition featuring new paintings and sculptures by Iva Gueorguieva opens 5 February 2016 and is on view through 14 March 2016. The opening reception is 5 February 2016 from 7:30 - 9 pm.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders has with her oil paintings spellbound a large audience in the US. Her paintings in the exhibition All Roads in My Mind depict scenes that most of us are familiar with: a boat trip or a summer day on the beach, and you can almost feel the wind in your hair, touch the sand and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Isca Greenfield-Sanders utilizes private photo slides found on eBay and from the chosen photographs she arranges parts and details into her work. The people she portraits are anonymous to her but also to the viewer by the way they are depicted, often from a distance and without any distinct characters. Her use of color and at times abstract fields in her paintings bring to mind painters like Claude Monet, Winslow Homer as well as the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill.

Brian Alfred's City Sunrise, 2004, will be on exhibition in the Denver Art Museum's reinstallation of the Modern & Contemporary galleries. Audacious: Contemporary Artists Speak Out officially opens to the public February 21, 2016 and will be on view through February 2017.

7. Stephen Dean at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, through February 6.

Labor intensive doesn't begin to describe the technique New York-based artist Stephen Dean uses to create the large-scale “Crossword" watercolor compositions featured in this exhibition of recent works. Each square of the hundreds of crossword puzzles from newspapers and magazines, mounted on archival Tycore, is tinted with a drop of watercolor, estimated at 100,000 drops per panel. The process of creating these works must be as rigorous and contemplative as the resulting images, which are at once visually arresting and psychically soothing. The fluid color counters the rigid geometric patterns of the crossword sections in each work, instigating a luminous, pulsating surface. The overall feeling must certainly correspond to that of finishing a particularly complex puzzle.

BY IAN EPSTEIN

As Stephen Dean was on his way back to the studio after a quick stop at the Outsider Art Fair last week, Artsy caught up with the artist to hear about his current show at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe—comprised of a series of huge crossword puzzles, dotted meticulously with color. These works are counterposed to a set of smaller drawings on Chinese calligraphy paper, where glass-head pins punctuate evenly spaced intersections. In his sculptures, videos, and works on paper, Dean often approaches color with a scientific perspective. But what’s clear from our conversation is that the psychological and spiritual histories of color weigh equally in his mind as he works. Using the tools of the laboratory and drawing inspiration from the microscopic to the prehistoric, Dean’s work celebrates the relationship between saturated color, transparency, and light.

In Aikido Dream, his new solo exhibition at MCA Santa Barbara, the Los Angeles–based artist Tam Van Tran slips sideways through the gaps separating painting, drawing, and sculpture, using multiple procedures and unusual materials (chlorophyll and spirulina but also Wite-Out and staples) to create densely layered objects, some of them quite beautiful.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 6:30–8:30pm

Equitable Vitrines is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Yunhee Min in its namesake headquarters, two vitrines in the lobby of Koreatown’s Equitable Life Building.

Nuno de Campos to exhibit drawings at the Museum of Goa, India, 12 February - 2 May 2016.

Morphology of Archive, an international exhibition featuring the work of thirty three artists curated by Sabitha TP and Lina Vincent, is conceptualised around connected migrant histories of Goa. Goa’s position as a significant port of trade and travel creates a unique cosmopolitan archive from which the various agents of history emerge. Goa has been an active site of trade and conquest from the 350 years of medieval Kadamba rule to the more recent 450 years under the Portuguese, profoundly shaping its architecture, music, cuisine, customs, and morphing identities. It is this deep cosmopolitanism in the internal and external landscape of Goa that this exhibition reflects. Morphology of Archive is a multimedia artistic engagement with the archive of transoceanic associations with Goa, its memories of other places, other peoples, other visual and tactile cultures that have all gone into the making of its diverse identity.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, in partnership with Art Production Fund, is pleased to announce P3Studio artists-in-residence Kate Gilmore and Franklin Evans. Through their interactive project, “Shelf Life,” Gilmore and Evans will use the activity of shared art making to explore Las Vegas. By juxtaposing the absurd with the logical, the project’s collection of curated and transformed material objects will reflect the principles that underlie the artists’ broader portfolios.

LOS ANGELES — The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) presents Paperworks, an exhibition that examines the range of work by fifteen contemporary artists with strong ties to Los Angeles who use paper as their primary medium. Their art comprises two- dimensional cut-outs and collages; free-standing sculptures; and large-scale installations that engage the architecture of the museum’s gallery space. Many of the works are created newly for this presentation. Paperworks, organized for the Craft & Folk Art Museum by independent curator Howard N. Fox, is on view from September 27, 2015 through January 3, 2016. An illustrated catalogue including texts on each artist will accompany the exhibition.

Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann opens October 10, 2015 and will headline the museum's Art Basel season, on view through January 3, 2016. The exhibition focuses on the artist's public mural projects, and also includes several key later paintings. It features nine oil studies (each seven feet tall) for the redesign of the Peruvian city of Chimbote (Hofmann's visionary collaboration in 1950 with Catalan architect Jose Luis Sert that was never realized).

Two works by Kevin Appel, House - South Rotation Red: 4 West and Houses and Timbers I, are included in a group exhibition, Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, at MoMA from 27 June 2015 - 6 March 2016.