As is usual for Cloud, his new works-arrangements of exposed stretcher bars and paint-slathered canvas—are as much relief sculptures as paintings. 'I've always felt that there was a really strong formal noise created by the format of painting,' Cloud told me as we walked through the exhibition. 'If you have a big, rectangular, unbroken...

When I learned to paint fifteen or twenty years ago, the dominant ideology was late modernism. In that ideology, painting was a territory where each painter staked a small aesthetic claim. There was room for all the painters because we dug downward in search of formal riches rather than moving outward into one another’s territories. So one painter...

Paintings are social structures, which is why their inherited authority needs to be short-circuited as part of the artistic process. That is our job as cultural producers. Remarkably, most paintings that appear on the walls of the best galleries (and also the striving ones) aren't interested in doing that. Instead, we are awash in whole-hearted...

The paintings that Pennsylvania-based Dona Nelson has been making in the most recent years of her nearly five-decade career are commonly referred to as double-sided, but that description is incomplete and limiting. Nelson does engage the canvas's front and back in a rich, reciprocal relationship, but the sides matter, too.

Si depuis quelques années les maisons de vente ont développé des initiatives–hors ventes pures–à destination d’un public élargi, elles ont opéré à l’aune d’une volonté de compléter l’offre à destination de leur clientèle, mais également portées par le désir de sensibiliser un public peu familier des maisons de vente.

Stained into the weave of the canvas, it is atmospheric and ghostly–sometimes lyrical, sometimes haunting, sometimes melancholic, sometimes dreamy. Puddled in crusty accumulations, it has the presence of scabbed-over injuries, larger-than-life-size wounds that are well on their way to healing but still painful to experience–firsthand or otherwise....

'Détournement' means taking an existing artwork or artifact and transforming it into something wiser, funnier and cooler, as evidenced in the show Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn's Modification Paintings, at Petzel Gallery. Jorn, a Danish artist associated with the Situationist International group in Paris in the '50s, was a...

When asked how she starts one of her recent quadrant-based paintings, Harriet Korman replies that her first step is to "find the center." She does so without the assistance of any measuring device, relying solely on her hand and eye to determine the point from which she will begin building out her right-angled bands of color.

Harriet Korman began exhibiting her abstract paintings in 1971, during Conceptual Art’s ascendancy and when many in the art establishment considered painting to be a casualty of history’s progress. Working in the wake of Minimalism, Color Field painting, shaped paintings, and painting-as-object, Korman rejected the argument Donald Judd put forth...

What's great about George Herriman's much admired early-20th-century comic strip Krazy Kat is its nearly unlimited scope for self-awareness. A stripped-down but playfully catholic style — combined with a sturdy, repetitive narrative frame — meant that Herriman could wink at the reader as often as he wanted, without losing his footing...

Memories of her own childhood well up in this strange, discombobulating, exciting exhibition. Wylie was born in 1934 and can remember the blitz. In her painting Rosemount (Coloured) the red outline of a V1 with its square wings flies over a roughed-out map of west London centred on a black silhouette of a factory with the name 'Rosemount'...

Often, a painting's content is described on the canvas in blocky handwriting that is as much a part of the picture as the figures the words snake around or run into. Yet in both thinking and making, the process is slow and considered. 'You can go on for about five hours doing just one little bit. It really can be hours.' Wylie recently had a stint...