Copyright 2011 The New York Sun Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:04:28 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss David Cohen :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/David+Cohen admin@nysun.net (Seth Lipsky) webmaster@nysun.com en-us David Cohen http://www.nysun.com/food-drink/sin-city-goes-tea-total/87415/ Fri, 1 Jul 2011 12:39:01 EST Readers of The New York Sun can be forgiven for assuming that a lead story here on a tea convention in Las Vegas must be Tea Party-related. “Did Sarah Palin play the slots?” you might be wondering. But for once, tea actually means camellia sinensis. While grass-roots conservatives claim ideological descent from revolutionaries dressed as Mohawks who deposited 342 chests of precious China tea into Boston Bay in 1773, the World Tea Expo, now in its ninth year, is devoted to people who really do... David Cohen http://www.nysun.com/arts/separating-the-goats-from-the-sheep/87403/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:05:37 EST Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park has a group of new sculptures at its north-east entrance plaza. The two goats and a deer, works by young Scottish artist Ruth McKerrell (born 1983), inaugurate a significant annual prize for New York, the Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award. Clare Weiss was a pioneering, dynamic curator of public art at New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, a position she held from 2005-2009. Shortly after she arrived at her job Ms Weiss was diagnosed with the cancer that... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/shows-to-see/87124/ Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 EST On view at Chowaiki & Co, Pier 92, Booth 246. The Armory Show takes place in two piers on the Hudson; Pier 92 hosts Modern, Pier 94 Contemporary, with over 200 galleries between them. The Armory Show's offshoot, Volta,, presents another 80 galleries. Also this weekend is the Art Dealers Association of America's Art Show at - to confuse things! - the Park Avenue Armory, plus several satellite fairs making this a saturated weekend for art aficianados. For a comprehensive listing of fair locations... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/crockery-heaven/87218/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:56:37 EST If the souls of crockery and tchochkes are destined for divine judgement then a well-behaved tea platter, ornament or china centerpiece equivalent of dying and going to heaven would be to end up in a sculpture by Joan Bankemper. "Sojourn" currently on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea, would be a crockery Elysian Field. Plate Purgatory, according to a similar theology, might be a 1980s painting by Julian Schnabel where offending articles are smashed and splattered with paint. But in... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/you-will-meet-a-tall-handsome-stranger-on/87192/ Sat, 8 Jan 2011 18:42:44 EST Think Bowery and it is either the New Museum or the Bowery Mission that likely springs to mind. But right now it is also the place to view something whose rarity and finesse belies both associations: a newly discovered portrait by the most famous female old "master", Artemisia Gentileschi. Her portrait of an unidentified, fashionable young nobleman, dated to the 1630s, is on view as part of a display of a dozen or so Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries on the fourth floor of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-remarkable-posthumous-debut/87179/ Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:49:05 EST The final, short gallery-going week of the year is also New York’s last chance to catch a remarkable posthumous debut. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, an artist who spent a long lifetime operating under the radar, is the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at Galerie St. Etienne, through Thursday. The daughter of an illustrious, aristocratic Austrian-Jewish family, she spent the better part of her life in London, from 1939 to her death in 1996, a few months shy of her 90th birthday. She was... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/synchronicity-at-columbia/87120/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:36:03 EST Up at Columbia’s LeRoy Neiman Gallery MFA student Nora Griffin – well-known already downtown and before her enrollment as a writer on the Brooklyn Rail and an exhibiting artist – has organized and is taking part in a show of quirky, whimsical, often belligerently casual abstraction, “Fool’s House,” closing Friday. The title derives from a painting by Jasper Johns who is a point of reference, perhaps, to various works on display in which language and gesture fuse, as in Griffin’s own “Of Bricks... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/septuagenarian-street-smarts/87114/ Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:53:27 EST Most viewers of Rose Wylie’s show at Thomas Erben Gallery, titled “WHAT with WHAT”, would want to conclude that the rambunctious, street-smart brutalism on display there is the work of an inner city kid who has been introduced with reluctance to the conventional and transportable medium of oil on canvas. Rotten luck with the guesswork. The author of these magisterially unrefined, at times gargantuan canvases, is a demure, “well spoken” English lady who resides in rural Kent: Think Miss Marple... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/writhing-forms/87112/ Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:08:18 EST Annabeth Rosen is not just holder of the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis in name but truly in spirit as well, extending the legacy of the legendary Arneson in a quest for fully sculptural expression through ceramic. Astoundingly for so revered a ceramic artist, her project room show at Meulensteen (formerly Max Protetch) is her New York solo debut. Filling the gallery’s window on 22nd Street are three hybrid personages that fuse elements of Medusa, Ubu Roi and... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/punchinello-hits-the-gym/87096/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:24:23 EST "Punchinello as Other" is Patrick Webb's fifth New York solo exhibition since 1993 to be devoted to imagined contemporary scenes involving characters from the Commedia dell'Arte. Also on view, in the project room, are paintings by Caren Canier. The Painting Center is at 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 343-1060... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/away-games/87090/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:59:26 EST For his latest show at Lori Bookstein, John Dubrow has taken to painting in other artists' studios -- or at least to painting images of their studios -- as subjects have come to include artists in their workspaces, There's veteran still life and landscape painter Ruth Miller in a dashing pair of green snow boots, William Bailey looking pensive amidst his canvases, poet Mark Strand astride a glass table on which is spread an almost neoplastic arrangement of primary-colored volumes, and a home... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-life-in-paint-and-other-materials/87083/ Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:20:55 EST The veteran abstractionist Joan Snyder has been showing in New York since the early 1970s. Her latest show, at Betty Cuningham, recalls those early works in their painterly abundance. Ms. Snyder's show is one among four exhibitions whose merits or otherwise are to be the subject of debate at The Review Panel in its first installment of the new season at the National Academy Museum. Moderator David Cohen, who is Publisher/Editor of artcritical.com, is joined on next Friday, September 24, by Wall... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-subject-of-fuss/87078/ Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:17:54 EST Until October 23 at 547 West 25th Street... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/skyscraper-painting-amidst-exhibition-sprawl/87072/ Tue, 7 Sep 2010 14:21:34 EST Martha Diamond's 1994 painting, Black, White, Gray Cityscape #3, was last seen in New York at the artist’s 2004 retrospective survey at the New York Studio School, an exhibition I organized as gallery director of that institution. From Thursday it is back on their walls as part of a sprawling exhibition the School generously allowed me to pull together as my parting shot: after nine years on the job I bid them farewell this month. This is a kind of "greatest hits" show with a work from each... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-exposure-required-composure/87061/ Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:41:56 EST The great romantic sculptor enlisted a number of photographers not merely to document his oeuvre but to mythologize his creativity. American Edward Steichen rose to the challenge, employing chiaroscuro and and double exposure to abut creator and creation in this double portrait of the archetypal thinker. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today is an audacious show at The Museum of Modern Art until November 1 that explores in all its diversity how the oldest artistic medium... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/modernism-under-the-radar/87037/ Fri, 6 Aug 2010 13:58:36 EST One of the Hampton’s quietest—and classiest—arts organizations is the Ayn Foundation’s Sagaponack, NY outpost. A chapel-like white cube within a barn across the road from a vineyard, the Ayn is a perfect home for the work of painter Joa Baldinger, who is the subject of her second show in this space in successive summers. Baldinger is an under-the-radar modernist masquerading as a new image painter. Superficial resemblances to Elizabeth Peyton or Fairfield Porter give way to a sense of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-world-on-his-own-terms/87031/ Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:24:04 EST This is the summer for Rackstraw Downes. A trifecta of exhibitions to savor in the Tristate area include a survey of drawings on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery through July 30; Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, is at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY through August 8; and Under the Westside Highway, a didactic show that brings together sketchbooks, drawings, small oil studies and a completed, multipaneled work, is at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut through... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/beach-beauty/87023/ Fri, 9 Jul 2010 15:46:53 EST Connie Fox, for thirty years and counting a year-round veteran of the legendary East Hampton art community, has been the subject of over sixty shows across a distinguished career, but is still what you'd have to call a painter's painter. Her quirky canvases are unsettlingly de-centered in their composition and eclectic in their spatial definition and their mark making, but manage nonetheless to exude an almost metaphysical sense of place. Her latest show, topographically unspecific yet intense... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/founding-father/87019/ Sun, 4 Jul 2010 16:08:24 EST Our Independence Day image is a 1969 photograph by Bill Beckley (very proto-Cindy Sherman). A survey of Mr. Beckley's work, ranging from conceptual text and image polyptychs to sumptuously ethereal Cibachrome nature studies, remains on view at Chelsea's Tony Shafrazi Gallery through July 30... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/mug-shot/87018/ Fri, 2 Jul 2010 10:58:09 EST Simon Gaon is a straight-up expressionist. He conveys rich, strong feelings about his surroundings, insisting on directness both of application and observation. New York born and trained, his style and sensibility are nonetheless directly European, having little truck with developments since Van Gogh, Kokoschka or Soutine. Best known for big, gutsy, effulgent cityscapes and street scenes, he is also a prolific portrait painter, preferring casually chanced upon characters over commissioned or... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/orgy-in-the-raw/87016/ Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:07:07 EST Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator. In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has organized, Mr. Fyfe pugnaciously shakes by its horns the francophobia of the American critical establishment. The show pairs contemporary practitioners from both sides of the pond known for their almost semiotic interrogations of a painting’s support... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/billboard-syncopations/87009/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:57:26 EST James Hyde is a painter who can rarely contain himself within two dimensions. His semiotic explorations of the medium have taken him in the direction of paint filled Plexiglass vitrines that approach the condition of sculptural installation, Styrofoam supports as deep as they are high or wide, and furniture. When he does play within a conventional painting support, as often as not found objects are affixed. But he will as good as ask you to step outside if you question his membership of the... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/tunnel-of-discovery/87005/ Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:33:11 EST British artist Christopher Cook's third solo show with Mary Ryan Gallery is titled "Concrete Firmament". His motif of freeway tunnels and his medium of liquid graphite on aluminum are exquisitely matched. The images are slippery, elusive, almost sly in the way they fix upon consciousness. Up through June 19, 527 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 397 0669... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/twister/86994/ Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:10:26 EST It is little surprise that the debut art exhibition of septuagenarian poet John Giorno should be “in your face.” An inveterate experimenter with new formats for poetry performance, Giorno pioneered what he called “Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments" in response to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and then honed his performance technique from visits to rock venues in the company of William S. Burroughs. The star of Warhol’s movie “Sleeper” (1963), Giorno’s art falls into the category of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/tunnel-vision/86972/ Mon, 24 May 2010 08:55:23 EST As the judiciously selected and stunningly installed exhibition at Tate Britain demonstrates, the 1930s were Henry Moore’s most fecund and innovative period of sculptural experimentation, confirming him as a leader of the modern movement in Britain. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, saw abrupt changes in output and outlook alike. He turned to drawing as his principal mode of expression, and responded to the suffering of the Blitz with a dark humanism in broodingly archetypal... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/wintours-eyes/86960/ Sun, 16 May 2010 13:22:16 EST According to Alex Katz, speaking publicly at London’s National Portrait Gallery on Friday with Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky and the Gallery’s director, Sandy Nairne, Americans size up someone immediately by their clothes and their haircut. (For Brits, by contrast, it is accent that determines class, and for the French, sentence structure.) He insists his portraits, like all his work, contains all the information in its surface, and that he has no interest in psychology. For his... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/chaste-yet-ravishing/86950/ Mon, 10 May 2010 15:22:21 EST Some think of Tel Aviv in relation to Israel as being like New York in America, the deliciously decadent heart of an otherwise puritanical land. Philip Pearlstein’s lithograph of a model seated amidst weathervanes is the suitably chaste yet ravishing Gala Print for the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s big New York fundraiser taking place Thursday at the Metropolitan Club. The veteran perceptual realist’s chilled precision gracefully contains a keen observational intensity... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/avigdor-arikha-1929-2010/86935/ Tue, 4 May 2010 01:01:37 EST The exquisite poise and quiet understatement of the work of Avigdor Arikha belies in style its passionate author, who died in Paris last week at 81. His paintings and pastels, infused with light and light in touch, were executed from direct observation and alla prima – in a single session. His character, on the other hand, was forged in darkness. Arikha was the supreme marvel of Israeli art, despite having only ever lived in the promised land for five years, in his youth. A survivor of Nazi... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/start-your-engines/86929/ Fri, 30 Apr 2010 02:50:57 EST The streaming, fluttering cardinal red forms of Russell Roberts’ Talking Engines of Our Day #5, 2005, are at once redolent of flags and limbs. They are strident against a dense moiré of textured ground yet also vulnerable, both in their tapering irregularity and their propensity to allow the ambiguous space behind to peep through their thin, veiling strokes. Talking Engines is included in Continuing Color Abstraction, an intellectually ambitious and richly diverse group exhibition organized by... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/engineering-optimism/87002/ Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:44:25 EST By the time Stalin coined the phrase “engineer of the soul” to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have been applicable: Constructivism. The suppressed impulse of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International enjoyed an unlikely afterlife, however, in the career of a Shanghai-born, California-raised Italian-American abstractionist. Mark di Suvero has populated sculpture parks, coporate plazas and... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/reading-between-the-linens-cecily-brown/86539/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A visitor to a Cecily Brown exhibition must think of him- or herself as a camera. Contemplating one picture at a time is the default mode. Seeing the show in a single take is the wide-angle view. And focusing upon individual brush marks, smears, and squiggles is the furthest extension of the zoom. In these terms, in the extremes of microcosm and macrocosm, her latest show of 39 canvases in three cavernous halls at Gagosian finds the artist in triumphant mode. It is hard to think of a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-conceptual-provocateur-rirkrit-tiravanija/86074/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Rirkrit Tiravanija is an art-world provocateur whose practice takes the central problem of conceptual art and runs wild with it. Conceptual art can mean different things, but whether seen historically — as an extension of Minimal art in its radical reduction of the art object for the sake of linguistically questioning art's nature — or understood more generally — as art where the material manifestation is strictly subservient to bigger ideas — the aesthetic problem of such art is: What is there... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/frozen-instants-of-failure/86080/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Diana Al-Hadid's menacing, heavily worked, baroque structures take arrested hubris as their theme. In three large sculptures, powerful in impact and ambition alike, a wall installation, and supporting drawings, once-soaring, elaborately engineered towers are rendered as ruins, whether slowly decaying in fragments or caught in a moment of catastrophic meltdown. Her evocations of destruction and decomposition generate rich surfaces as well as unsettling contemplations of the demise of powerful... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/paintings-post-feminist-form-sculptures-matron/85974/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A striking feature of the roster of shows on offer this season in New York's commercial galleries and nonprofit spaces is the strength of sculpture and sculptural installation. First up is a two-person show of sculptural installation at James Cohan Gallery (until October 4), featuring Xu Zhen and Folkert de Jong, whose aesthetic is similarly robust and visceral. Diana Al-Hadid, who is having her debut solo show at Perry Rubenstein (until October 11), has made a Tower of Babel-like structure... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-bordo-the-heady-hedonist/85598/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the title for his 2007 Venice Biennale, critic and curator Robert Storr exhorted the art world to "think with the senses, feel with the mind." One artist who has already staked a claim to what could be called the "concept-sualist" position is Robert Bordo. With his new show at Alexander and Bonin of 14 landscape canvases, the Montreal-born painter demonstrates himself to be more than ever the heady hedonist. He has an incredible touch, seducing the eye with lubricated surfaces as if his... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/bits-and-pieces-brought-together-ashbery-and-naves/85140/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry, in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets such as Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography — arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/trevor-winkfield-the-conceptual-collagist/85141/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Trevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of John Ashbery's collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, uniform, and automobile-like in their finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/locating-propriety-in-the-inappropriate/84405/ Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST There is something appropriate in finding Zach Feuer Gallery open for business in mid-August with a Phoebe Washburn installation, when the rest of Chelsea is a ghost town. Seeing this Dadaistic riff on productivity in a gallery district that feels like the artistic equivalent of the Rust Belt cannot but accent an initial response to it. Almost every door on West 24th Street has notices of apology as galleries prep themselves for the relaunch of the season, after Labor Day. Ms. Washburn's... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/british-modernisms-triple-threat/83812/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Wyndham Lewis was the "triple threat" of British Modernism: He was accomplished — and innovative — as the writer of linguistically dazzling satires such as "The Apes of God" and "Tarr." He was as an abstract artist who led the pioneering Vorticist group just prior to World War I. And, as a bracing exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London shows, he was a portrait artist of the first degree. Whether his subjects were literary lions, patrons, lovers, or himself, he painted... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/hopper-cityscapes-prior-to-the-paint/83325/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST As this gem of an exhibition on the Upper East Side demonstrates, Edward Hopper found himself in etching. For the first 18 years of his career, unable to support himself by painting, Hopper was obliged to work as a commercial illustrator. He worked for various New York advertising agencies, and enjoyed a short stint on the New Masses, the socialist paper whose art editor was his friend and, to some extent, mentor, John Sloan. Printmaking presented itself as a natural corollary to his day job... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/shh-hammershi-is-on-display/82500/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Whenever there is an exhibition of the Symbolist painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, his quietude is invoked. When he was shown at the Guggenheim in New York 10 years ago, partly through the efforts of the late Robert Rosenblum, who helped revive international interest in a master neglected since his untimely death at age 52 in 1916, the show was subtitled "Danish Painter of Solitude and Light." At the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1983, it was "Stillness and Light." And now, at London's... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/smears-scribbles-and-scratches-twombly-at/82044/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London's Tate Modern is a reminder that, above all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, with its extremes of slightness and scatter, informality can border on the infantile. This show, which is curated by the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall, and then to Rome's National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-location-of-the-second-generation/81598/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Only a philistine could think that something as complex and nuanced as artistic success could be explained along the lines of the real estate mantra "location, location, location." And yet, there is no doubt that location plays a key role in the careers of artists who make the canon. Absence from New York City, for instance, was crucially detrimental to the posterity of a would-be practitioner of Abstract Expressionism, which also goes under the name New York School. The Jewish Museum's current... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/phillip-pearlstein-objectifying-the-nude/81183/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost retrospective overview of his career at Betty Cuningham, "Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now," suggests in 13 canvases ranging from 1964-69 and 1988-2008. And yet, for all the pounds of flesh and claustrophobic constructions of actual, lived-in and worked-in space these pictures present, the paintings are... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-erotic-the-political-and-the-personal/80685/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor set off a strange chain reaction of anger and lyricism. She is an artist driven by both sociopolitical protest and ambiguous, personal longings, linking her to Surrealism. Her paintings are at the dual service of Eros and Thanatos, awash equally with alienation and empathy, desire and indignation... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-to-the-future/80264/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST New York will have a "back to the future" feel starting next week, thanks to the opening of the Whitney Museum's eagerly awaited exhibition, "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe." As if to keep company with this extraordinary, off-the-wall design theorist and inventor, two venues in SoHo have shows that celebrate lesser-known, though exemplary, mid-20th-century aesthetic theorists with a penchant for the fusion of art and science. These men, both scions of the Austro-Hungarian empire... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/elizabeth-cooper-and-angela-fraleigh-masters/79812/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes, artists look as if they are having such fun with paint that the sheer hedonism of their facture can be infectious. Such is the case with the painterly splurges, splatterings, and pourings seen in two solo shows by two exuberant artists, who both happen to be women in their 30s. Elizabeth Cooper's eighth solo show in as many years is her second at Thrust Projects on the Lower East Side, while Angela Fraleigh, a Texan and 2003 Yale graduate, is having her New York debut at the P.P.O.W... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/hunt-slonems-birds-of-a-feather-flocking-together/79827/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Marlborough Chelsea's second-floor premises in the new Chelsea Arts Tower, a gallery condominium building on West 25th Street, is an elegant space that cries out for subtle installations. That Hunt Slonem's solo exhibition there packs in 20 canvases of glaringly contrastive colors and sizes hung virtually cheek by jowl seems a strategy for generating a deliberately jarring aesthetic experience. If half these pictures had been left out of the show, it would have been exponentially easier on the... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/catherine-murphy-sneaking-glimpses-of/79339/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Catherine Murphy's first show with Knoedler & Company finds the veteran realist at her most compelling, though — as ever — her work is compellingly odd rather than compellingly beautiful. She is a tough painter to enjoy, but her unflinching, emotionally neutral realism is extraordinary for the level of its attentiveness. She has a fascinated gaze whose focus is both micro- and macroscopic, dealing with both minute details and broad philosophical issues about perception and aesthetic value in... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/milton-resnick-was-an-abex-pioneer/78823/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST A late starter or a painter ahead of his time? An earnest also-ran or a prickly, enigmatic genius? Too sensual or too hermetic? Milton Resnick was a first-generation abstract expressionist fated — in his lifetime, at least — to elude the canon of that defining 20th-century American art movement. And the legacy of this artist, who died in 2004, is still up for grabs, although if any show will persuade waverers of his sumptuous lyricism and high purpose, it is the stunning display of work from...