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J. J. Murphy

@dagcentral

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filmmaker, film scholar, art writer, and gallerist

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I was unfamiliar with Deborah Kahn’s work prior to seeing her current solo exhibition of paintings and drawings from 2017–2022 at 15 Orient in TriBeCa. Kahn received her MFA from Yale, taught for many years at Indiana and American University, and showed at the longtime cooperative Bowery Gallery in Chelsea. In fact, several of these works were part of her 2022 exhibition. There is something classical about her work, which is not surprising given that she takes inspiration from art history. Kahn’s paintings are fundamentally about color and space. In an interview, she noted, “What I think about is structuring the color, moving it through the space of the painting, transforming the flat surface of the canvas into volume and form.” There is a theatrical element to her work, which features figures, animals, and birds. In “Still” (2019), for instance, two human figures—a smaller-sized one sitting and a larger one standing—appear in the foreground on the left. Action occurs on two planes, as if below and on top of a stage. On the right, an animal seems to pull back a curtain revealing another space, but the rope extends to two other human forms. A person on a trapeze is part of the lower scene. It’s as if the figurative elements, many of which have a statuesque and random quality, have been collaged onto the painting. The more one looks at the paintings, the more one is struck by their abstraction due to Kahn’s use of bands and patches of color: yellow, olive, cyan, ochre, reddish brown, black, and sap green, among others. The space in “The Window” (2022) and “Dancing” (2021) recedes far into the background, extending the confounding illusionism Kahn seems intent on creating. It is tempting to say that this show represents a discovery. It strikes me that Kahn’s work has been overlooked, even if it’s been hiding in plain sight.
@15orient #figurativepainting #contemporarypainting #contemporaryartist @bowery_gallery by @dagcentral

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I saw Lisa Sanditz’s previous NYC solo exhibitions at CRG in 2008 and 2014. Sanditz’s earlier one, “Sock City,” drew inspiration from a trip to China. It featured paintings that dealt with the glut of consumer products—socks, underwear, and Christmas-related items—fabricated for the export market, resulting in horrific environmental pollution. In the interim period, Sanditz has been showing in London and Los Angeles, so it’s exciting that she has a new exhibition, “Missing Mountain,” at Alexandre Gallery, Uptown. A couple of years back, Sanditz, who lives in the Catskills, was shocked by the sudden disappearance of a familiar mountain as a result of the smoke from Canadian wildfires. If a mountain could disappear, what else might be possible? The disruption of a familiar view seemed like a sign of the times. In this new body of work, the artist explores the mutation of landscapes through a variety of different strategies. In one, she renders the mountainous landscape as hot pink. Other paintings play with visibility through an emphasis on atmospheric conditions. One depicting the mountain during an eclipse looks like a volcanic eruption. In another, a young boy eats a cup of Stewart’s sherbet as he sits atop the landscape, while the frozen dessert substitutes for the sun. If climate change has altered the world, how can one raise a child in such an environment? Sanditz creates these types of associations. “Debris Flow” (2026) seems emblematic of the sense of the world she is trying to convey, one in which forest fires and mudslides wreak havoc. If one looks closely, a car seems to drop straight down the mountainside, while trees flow sideways in an impossible space. Sanditz’s vision is a dark one. As she notes, “Power is slipping from the hands of the capable into aberrant uncharted territory.” If there’s any redemption, Sanditz’s show posits that it resides in the power of her wildly inventive imagination.
@lisasanditz @alexandregallery #landscapeart #contemporarypainting #contemporaryartist by @dagcentral

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6 days ago

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since John Dilg’s last solo exhibition in New York City. Thirteen small landscape paintings comprise his stellar new show “Once and Future” at Peter Freeman Gallery in Tribeca/SoHo. In the intervening years, Dilg’s work has achieved greater visibility. Most paintings still consist of trees, rock formations, and water. They are constructed, impossible, or make-believe landscapes. The artist has been obsessed with waterfalls over the years; many of the paintings contain them but confound us in several striking ways. As a result of collecting amateur paintings on the subject, Dilg became fascinated with the various ways to depict falling water. In “Idaho” (2024), the water cascades straight down except for the slight cloud-like shapes of what could be perceived as splashes below. “Mythology” (2026) consists of multiple small falls only to end up in a shallow pool. For Dilg, water is less a phenomenon of nature—less a powerful force—than an elemental compositional shape. In an interview, the artist acknowledged, “I’m interested in the relationship of the visually iconic to essential form.” As I suggested about his last show, the pared-down simplicity and muted color palette recall the work of the Chicago self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum. The images, for the most part, feel like mirages, which connect them to memory. Dilg’s process is to sand the canvas, create faint outlines, and add muted, earthy tones of tinted color: green, brown, and blue. Some of the canvasses, such as the rocky island with trees, “Missing” (2026), have a slight salmon cast. The weave of the canvas becomes a distinct part of the image; they remain inseparable from each other, like cave paintings and the rocks on which they appear. The paintings have a weathered look, as if they are already antique representations, creating “quiet spaces” that, as Dilg suggests, “yield a broader sense of time.”
@peterfreemaninc #landscapeart #contemporarypainting #contemporaryartist by @dagcentral

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Matthew Higgs curated the best of the large summer group shows in the old church that serves as a seasonal space for Karma Gallery in Thomaston, Maine. “Outside” explores the relationship between our inner psychological worlds and exterior physical places, works that Higgs refers to as “psychotopographies.” The exhibition blurs the distinction between self-taught and trained artists and includes a number associated with Maine, such as Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Katherine Bradford. The stylistic diversity of the show is its major strength. In Uman’s “a place called Cherry Valley” (2025), faint images of human figures appear within the colorful landscape, suggesting that places also have memories. Zenzaburo Kojima’s “Garden in Snow” (1932) depicts animated trees visually altered by snow. In a similar manner, Bradford’s “Late August, Low Tide” (2026) creates a sense of motion by shifting the body positions of the various bathers. Jacob Littlejohn uses myriad dabs of paint to energize a small post-impressionistic landscape with trees. Richard Bosman’s placement of a man’s hat on the forest ground becomes strangely surreal, recalling Magritte. The reclusive Albert York strove for perfection. As a result, he didn’t produce many works, so it was a thrill to see his mysterious “Landscape with Alligator” (n.d.), in which the outline of an alligator passes a patch of murky soot, which mimics the form of the white clouds above. I was unfamiliar with the work of Paul Kain, an artist from Trinidad. His painting “Good Morning Ladies” (2025) exhibits a distinct folk art quality, reflecting vibrant island life. Louis M. Eilshemius’s “Civil War Battle Scene” (1917), in which a man shoots another from afar, is the show’s most eccentric painting, which might explain why Duchamp was a fan of the little-known American artist. Works include: 1) Kojima; 2) Uman; 3) Bradford; 4) Littlejohn; 5) Bosman; 6) York; 7) Kain; 8) Eilshemius; 9) Jane Corrigan; 10) Reggie Burrows Hodges.
@karmakarma9 @matthewhiggs2015 @kathebradford @bosman_richard @jacobalittlejohn #landscapeart #contemporarypainting #contemporaryart #selftaughtartist by @dagcentral

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We all understand genres in art, such as portraits, landscapes, and still lifes; yet such categories turn out to be remarkably porous. The current exhibition, “The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met,” demonstrates how modernism upended conceptions of what constitutes a portrait by using varied examples from the permanent collection. In “Young Sailor II” (1906), Matisse takes liberties with “resemblance” by rendering the sardine fisherman’s features in bright Fauvist colors. It becomes more about reflecting the person’s character, as is the case with Max Beckmann’s “The Old Actress” (1926) or Otto Dix’s portrait of a stern businessman. Portraits can be more generalized, such as Charles Henry Alston’s depiction of an idealized Black woman. Inspired by automatism, the Surrealist Eileen Agar employed the technique of poured paint to capture her inner life in her self-portrait from 1949. Miró used a word, a color, and a phrase on a white canvas to reflect “This Is the Color of My Dreams” (1925). Portraits can be collective, as evidenced by Florine Stettheimer’s painting of the New York Stock Exchange. In a similar vein, is Bonnard’s “The Terrace at Vernonnet” (1939) more of a landscape? Arthur Dove chose found objects to reflect the personality of the architect Ralph Dusenberry, but it appears to be more of a still life, which is how I might also categorize Diego Rivera’s “The Café Terrace” (1915). The show expands the boundaries of what constitutes a portrait by including several abstract works along with sculptural objects: a hand mirror, a chair, a patriotic radio, a wooden leg splint, and a potato masher. It was at this point that I began to question curator Stephanie D’Alessandro’s broad premise. Nonetheless, she has created a challenging, fun, and engaging exhibition. Works by: 1) Matisse; 2) Beckmann; 3) Dix; 4) Alston; 5) Agar; 6) Stettheimer; 7) Bonnard; 8) Rivera; 9) Kandinsky; 10) Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
@metmuseum #matisse #bonnard #portraiture #portraitart by @dagcentral

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2 months ago

The paintings of the German-born, South Bronx artist Florian Krewer continue to exude the same feverish intensity as the early works that gained him prominence during the height of Covid. His latest exhibition of large paintings at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, entitled “woven thin,” includes several works that appeared in his recent solo shows uptown. The impressive new show feels carnivalesque, an expressionistic dreamscape of fluorescent pink, purple, lime, orange, and yellow. Krewer creates a dark vision of the world. Human figures have grotesque features, animals growl at us, a band of skeletons play music, and a devilish figure appears. Like Katherine Bradford’s figures, Krewer’s are multicolored, such as the purple person in a white outfit who dances in the foreground of “flamingo” (2026) or the one with camouflage skin in “green boots” (2022). In “no endz” (2023), a figure with long black hair views their reflection in water, which becomes an image of horror. In many ways, “in the echo” (2026) seems emblematic of the show. It depicts various animals and people caught in a giant spider web. The expressions of the five figures, who could be a family, evoke Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893). The young male figure on the right, possibly a teenager, kneels on the ground with an inflated erection. There’s a sense that Krewer’s subjects wear “masks.” That becomes apparent in “handball” (2026), which features an urban scene of four figures playing handball at night. Not only do they all have different skin tones, but the faces of the three visible figures appear masklike. That’s also true of the two subjects, one in high heels, who attempt to trudge through a snowy landscape in “cold roses” (2023). For Krewer, masks are protection, yet I’m reminded of what Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
@museedartmodernedeparis @veneklasengallery #floriankrewer #germanartist #contemporarypainting #contemporaryartist @matthewhiggs2015 @boogiecrash by @dagcentral

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3 months ago

Henry Taylor’s remarkable exhibition, “Where Thoughts Provoke,” at the Picasso Museum in Paris contextualizes the artist’s connection to European masters of modern art, including Picasso. This is evident in works such as “From Congo to the Capital, and black again” (2007), a deliberate reversal of Picasso’s borrowing from African culture, and Taylor’s rendition of Picasso’s painting of Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” (1863). Even Taylor’s compelling portrait of his partner, the sculptor Liz Glynn, “Who Knew I Would Paint You Blue” (2025), evokes Picasso’s Blue Period. The painting suggests a casual snapshot compositionally. Glynn sits in a backyard chair in front of a blue swimming pool in a landscape containing blue trees and sky, while a leg and sneaker intrude from the bottom left. Although modern art informs Taylor’s work, the real strength of his portraits lies in observing life occurring around him: his family and neighborhood, as well as Black culture. “Look” (2015) features two African American men sitting in a car, including one in an SF Giants baseball hat who stares directly at us. “Father, Son, Fun” (2022) depicts an intimate scene of a father lobbing a baseball to his son who holds a cocked bat, an image that counters stereotypes about Black families. The kitchen scene in “Cora, (cornbread),” 2008, pays tribute to the artist’s mother, while another portrays his brother, a Vietnam veteran. The police and prisons appear frequently as symbols of racial injustice. “Trail” (2005) is a jazz-inspired work about George Jackson, the incarcerated Black Power activist and writer of “Soledad Brother,” who was gunned down by guards at San Quentin Prison. It includes a reference to Bob Dylan. “Homage to a Brother” (2007) memorializes the murder of Sean Bell by plainclothes detectives in NYC on his wedding day. What distinguishes Taylor’s raw portraits is not only the enormous sense of empathy he creates for his subjects but also their ability to tell stories.
@museepicassoparis @chinatowntaylor #blackart #blackartist #picasso #contemporarypainting #portraitart by @dagcentral

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3 months ago

Van Doren Waxter showed a series of portraits by Richard Diebenkorn two years ago. The uptown gallery’s current show, “Still Life,” presents still lifes that Diebenkorn made during the same period: 1956 to 1967. The New York critics at the time considered the artist’s shift from abstract expressionism to representation as a conservative retreat and betrayal of modernism. Diebenkorn’s position was akin to that of Fairfield Porter in contending that abstraction and representation represent a continuum, or, as he argued, “a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference.” For him, only results mattered. The criticism of Diebenkorn was part of what Porter considered the prevailing “dogmatism” of established art critics, such as Clement Greenberg. It now seems a reflection of New York’s own provincialism in dismissing resistant developments here and in other parts of the country, notably San Francisco and Chicago. “Untitled (Still Life with Orange),” 1957, contains small abstractions, such as the slice of bread, within a larger abstract background. The strip at the top suggests a distant seascape, adding an unexpected element. “Knife + Tomato II” (1963) also appears to be a still life situated in a landscape by the ocean, with waves at the top. The abstract shape that mirrors the knife keeps the composition from being conventional. “Chair Outside” (c. 1959) divides the background into four quadrants of color; three of them contain purple and two shades of blue. The bluish shadows from the chair spill over into the orange segment, along with part of the blue quadrant itself. In a studio note during this period, Diebenkorn wrote, “When I select a subject to work from, I seem to include one element or thing that is all wrong—which works against the total feeling or unity.” This approach creates a certain formal tension; the “wrongness” allows these intriguing still lifes to transcend the genre. Please note: the show closes today, June 26.
@vandorenwaxter @diebenkornfoundation #stilllife #stilllifepainting #bayareaartist #fairfieldporter by @dagcentral

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3 months ago

After the Second World War, abstract expressionism and color field painting became the dominant movements in American art, followed by pop art. The question of who and what becomes elevated has to do with established power at a given time. Abstract expressionism was promoted by Clement Greenberg and, we know now, the American government. As Pierre Bourdieu observed, “Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.” Schoelkopf Gallery in TriBeCa currently has a stellar exhibition, “New York City Circa 1960: Works from the Collection of Robert A. Ellison, Jr.” Ellison was an artist, dealer, and collector who later donated his major collection of ceramics to the Met. Besides abstract works, the show presents many that employ expressionistic figuration. A student of Hans Hofmann, Jan Müller (1922–1958) is one of the great artists of the 1950s but remains underrecognized. Using broad gestural brushstrokes, rich color, and large scale, he became part of the alternative art scenes in NYC and Provincetown, along with Bob Thompson, Jay Milder, Lester Johnson, Robert De Niro Sr., and Wolf Kahn. Müller’s work drew heavily on myth. A number of his paintings depict a white-faced male figure on a horse and naked women in a forest, such as “Equestrian Figures” (1957). “Provincetown Landscape” (c. 1955) features a rainbow-like scene of trees with a house in the background. Müller, who died at age 35, had recently passed away by the time Bob Thompson arrived in Provincetown. Yet his influence on the younger artist is unmistakable, as is evident from Thompson’s small, untitled Crucifixion study from 1963. Numerous heads and bodies scrunched together dominate Jay Milder’s “Subway Figures # 3” (1963), another standout painting in the exhibition. Works by 1, 2) Müller; 3) Thompson. 4) Milder; 5, 6, 7) Milton Resnick; 8) Elaine de Kooning; 9) Robert De Niro Sr.; 10) Ben Johnson.
@schoelkopfgallery #abstractexpressionism #figurativepainting #modernart #bobthompson by @dagcentral

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3 months ago

In a review of Fairfield Porter’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1984, Grace Glueck referred to his landscapes, interiors, portraits, and still lifes as “certainly among the finest realist paintings produced in the United States since the end of World War II.” The Whitney show was entitled “Fairfield Porter (1907–1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction.” Porter considered himself a realist, yet, to me, he is not really one in the conventional sense. An astute art critic as well as an artist, Porter had a much more complicated, nuanced, and philosophical understanding of realism. His new show at the Art Students League, uptown, “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows,” billed as “the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in New York City in twenty-five years,” makes that clear. Although Porter painted the ordinary world around him—his house, children, wife, friends, and lover—Porter is not so much interested in producing likeness or verisimilitude but in the act of perception of the visual world as rendered by the material qualities of paint. Porter, who idolized Willem de Kooning, once observed, “The important thing for critics to remember is the ‘subject matter’ in abstract painting and the abstraction in representational work.” This tendency is most obvious in a painting of his son, “Laurence at the Breakfast Table” (1953), which lacks facial detail. Other paintings by Porter provide more subtle examples. Porter renders the grass, trees, and foliage in “Untitled (View Outside Southampton Studio),” 1968, as patches of color. In his portrait of two poets, James Schuyler and John Ashbery, he captures their resemblance, but it’s the abstract elements—Ashbery’s white shirt, Schuyler’s pants, the pattern of the couch, and the more formal qualities—that make the painting engaging. Porter didn’t see abstraction and representation as an opposition but as a spectrum. It’s his recognition of this fact that informed both his criticism and his art.
@aslnyc @fairfield_porter #willemdekooning #modernart @elizabethhazan #johnashbery by @dagcentral

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4 months ago

The current show of Philip Guston’s paintings and drawings at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea, entitled “Life with P,” presents another side of the artist. Musa Mayer’s memoir of her father, “Night Studio,” is not the most flattering portrait. Despite the respect she has for his work, Mayer portrays Guston as being more focused on his art than his family. The new exhibition has only one small Klan painting and avoids the more well-known works that reference major social and political issues. Instead, it provides us with a more intimate glimpse of the bond he shared with his wife, the poet Musa McKim, acknowledging her emotional and creative importance to him. Two paintings portray their relationship. “Blue Cover” (1977) shows Guston and McKim lying in bed under a blue blanket. The painting is a more simplified version of “Couple in Bed” from the same year, in which Guston depicts himself in a fetal position, clutching paintbrushes in his hand, while he and his wife snuggle together. In “Blue Cover,” we only see their heads: the red slab of Guston on the left and the mass of hair on the right depicting McKim, an example of his use of synecdoche to portray human figures. “Two Hearts” (1978) shows two overlapping hearts punctured by arrows, reminding us that Cupid carried two kinds: one “golden” and the other “leaden.” The painting suggests the ability of love not only to bring joy but also to inflict deep wounds on the other person. Another painting, “Untitled” (1976), depicts a cartoonish version of the upper part of McKim’s face and exaggerated curly hair with her eyes peering upward. Besides the three previously unseen paintings and many smaller ones, the show includes Guston’s “Poem Pictures,” a collaborative series of drawings that interact with McKim’s poetry, works that, at least for me, came as a surprise.
@hauserwirth #figurativepainting #philipguston #contemporarypainting #contemporaryartist by @dagcentral

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4 months ago

Recent art auctions have highlighted major collections by S. I. Newhouse, Agnes Gund, Marian Goodman, and Robert Mnuchin. The current show at David Zwirner in Chelsea features remarkable works from “The Great Unseen Collection” of the Midwest collectors Joel and Carole Bernstein. In the 1980s, their interests switched from abstract to more figurative work because they wanted their collection to reflect the contemporary world around them. Included are three outstanding portraits by Alice Neel of Red Grooms and Mimi Gross (1967), Dorothy Pearlstein (1973), and her daughter-in-law Nancy (1981) in a polka-dot dress. Neel has slowly become a towering figure in American art. Her earlier portrait of Nancy and her granddaughter Olivia, “Mother and Child” (1967), just sold for a record $5.7 million at Christie’s. Neel’s portraits always feel incredibly intense and deeply emotional. It’s no wonder the artist admitted that the portraits left her drained, observing, “I have no self—I have gone into this other person.” Another highlight is Joan Brown’s “The Night Before The Alcatraz Swim” (1975), in which she sits in a chair with a pensive expression, sipping a hot drink, while Alcatraz looms out the window, surrounded by a dark magenta sunset. The bold colors create a strong contrast between the subject and setting. Although a highly experienced swimmer, Brown nearly drowned the following day when a passing freighter caused massive waves during an all-women’s historic swim to the island. Fairfield Porter’s “Iced Coffee” (1966) fuses the indoors and outdoors by situating its two figures within a screened porch. His friend Jane Freilicher commented about the “unfinished” quality of Porter’s paintings; his genius was knowing what details to leave out and which elements of a composition to make more abstract. Works by: 1–3) Alice Neel; 4) Joan Brown; 5) Fairfield Porter; 6) Peter Saul; 7) Bob Thompson; 8) Eric Fischl; 9) Roger Brown; 10) Audrey Flack.
#davidzwirnergallery #contemporaryart #aliceneel #portraitart by @dagcentral

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4 months ago