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...

In an artist's talk I attended a few nights after the opening of his current exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery, Tears in abstraction, Cloud recounted that he was not exposed to many paintings at all when he was growing up, and that when he came to painting it was through a how-to-paint instruction book and from reading theories of art. The...

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...

'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 master of...

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 or...

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' scrawled...

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...