An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, December 1, 2025
Hello, December! I’m grateful to everyone who has already supported Two Coats of Paint 2025 Year-end Fundraising Campaign. With roughly four weeks left, we still need additional contributions to fund 2026. If you haven’t yet donated, I encourage you to consider making your tax-deductible gift now. For two decades, I’ve managed to sustain Two Coats of Paint on a lean…
Contributed by Amanda Church / Conjuring The Cure’s 1987 song Just Like Heaven – which proclaims “you’re just like a dream” – Karin Davie’s eight new large-scale paintings on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, all oil on linen, transport us to a realm of sensation and association. Here her wavy imagery, which she has been developing in one form or another since the 1990s, immediately evokes the swells and dips of the ocean’s surface as well as recalling the fluid lines essential to the work of painters like Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Bridget Riley, Moira Dryer, and late de Kooning, albeit to varying effect.
Contributed by David Carrier / The Guggenheim has frequently presented the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). Now, finally, the museum has provided the opportunity to celebrate Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), Kandinsky’s domestic partner of ten years and a fellow founder of the Blue Rider Group – the Munish-based network of artists that pioneered German Expressionism just before the First World War.
Contributed by Lucas Moran / Maybe death isn’t final but simply a door leading into another room. That feeling ran through “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” an excellent group show at Active Space in Bushwick curated by Patrick Bower and Robert Zurer of Immaterial Projects. It tapped into whatever lies just beyond perception: the subconscious, the occult, the spirits, the talismans, the circus freaks. Everything half-seen or half-remembered was allowed to take shape. If contemporary painting has drifted away from figuration and identity, this show suggested we may be heading towards something more concealed – art that conjures rather than describes, call it hiddenist painting, embracing what is buried, invisible, or occulted, where death, memory, and imagination loop into one.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Stephanie Deady’s coolly seductive oil-on-birchwood paintings now on display at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin – all archly titled, like the show itself, Emotional Calculus – draw you in like mirages of serenity. For that purpose, they incisively deploy beauty: tawny, fluid backgrounds envelop rhythmically interacting shapes of red, blue, or white, lending each package of images visual harmony and compositional stability. In due course, the paintings reveal deeper intent, which is to complicate and enrich your ultimate apprehension of the presumptively simple life.
Many thanks to those who have contributed to Two Coats of Paint’s 2025 Year-end Campaign. About five weeks remain, and we could use quite a bit more help. For those who have not yet made a move, I urge you to make your tax-deductible contribution soon.
Contributed by Lawre Stone / Meg Lipke makes enormity relatable. The immense Slanting Grid welcomes visitors to her exhibition “Matrilines” at Broadway Gallery. Monumental in scale, soft in countenance, this 8 x 16-foot work of painted and stitched fiber-filled muslin rises above the viewer, floating grandly along one of the gallery’s longest walls.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / In Clintel Steed’s show of paintings at Shrine Gallery, “Different Time Zones, Different Dimensions,” temporal experience is evoked through formal language as much as subject matter. In most, dynamic fragmentations of contemporaneity are fixed in static tessellations of paint. Richly varied shapes, packed in shallow space on dense surfaces, lead from abstraction to illusion.
Contributed by David Carrier / Arriving at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, I was surprised that someone had hung a puffer jacket on the entry wall. Such galleries are usually immaculate. I walked on, for there was a lot to see in Analia Saban’s extraordinary show “Flowchart.” Upstairs, Core Memory, Plaid (Black, White, and Fluorescent Orange), a woven paint construction on a walnut frame, visually alludes to both weaving and magnetic-core random-access memory, a building block of early computing. In the downstairs gallery, five large tapestries picture playful flowcharts – hardly the traditional subjects of woven art – that marry the handmade and the digital.
John Adams Griefen (b. Worcester, MA, 1942; d. Bergerac, France 2025) was an American artist and early Color Field painter who made important contributions to abstract art in the United States and in Europe. In his successful career as a painter he had seventeen solo exhibitions in New York City, the first at age 27. Foremost, Griefen is known for the essence of color in his paintings, and for many years, he made large, often monumental, acrylic paintings on canvas.
Contributed by Mary Jones / The old joke begins, “A horse walked into a bar…” That could be one of the titles of the 15 new ceramic pieces in Noa Ironic’s lively show, “The Good Chyna,” now up at bitter.nyc. Ironic’s horse, however, would be high on ecstasy. Fantasy and desire abound as she negotiates identity, social anxiety, memory, and a little poker. “I like oversharing,” she says. Ironic’s work explores gender, and particularly masculinity, and in “The Good Chyna” she proves a prescient and empathetic observer.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / There is a bound wildness to Liz Ainslie’s new paintings at Deanna Evans Projects. Across 18 paintings, three of which are over six feet tall and the largest she’s made to date, Ainslie introduces an eclectic menagerie of loops, halos, and squiggles penned in by stripes, checkerboards, and color fields. The works are beguiling hybrids of perception and abstraction in their pursuit of free-form reverie with formal discipline.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Iranian government has looked askance at political assertiveness and social progressivism since the revolution of 1979. The pressure under which women operate is especially heavy. Political protest, however, cannot be a way of life. Day to day, Iranians are compelled to avoid confrontations that could place them in jeopardy, discreetly acknowledging anguish and resolving to sublimate it. Shirin Mirjamali, whose exquisitely intense works on paper are now on display in her solo show “Hidden Longing” at Anita Rogers Gallery, exemplifies this essentially pensive disposition.
Contributed by Marjorie Welish / The group show “Fold, Drape, Repeat” now up at Ceysson & Bénétière does what it says. A select showing of work by the loosely aggregated French collective Supports/Surfaces, the exhibition embodies the very assembly involved in making art. Offbeat maneuver never succumbs to product or merchandise. Put another way, each individual artist emphasizes how the construction of art respects the commonplace materials at hand.
Contributed by Bill Arning / Long-time Bosman watchers often recall his work as a firehose of imagery—gunfights and car chases, sinking ships, kidnappings, and robberies pouring out in rapid succession. Fans might therefore be surprised when entering his first solo show at Kingston’s beloved Headstone Gallery, a venue known for its ambitious program of younger artists. In inviting an older master like Bosman, the gallery has delightfully broadened its scope.
