Tag: gesturalabstraction

Ariel Mitchell

Is in Street Corner Conversations with Sharon and Wendy. Mitchell’s work explores boundaries and control. Beginning with a linen surface lying flat on a table, she dribbles white acrylic and clear medium, smooshing it intuitively with her fingers. Once dry, she chooses oil colors straight from the tubes. Using a tiny brush and very little pigment, she carefully stains the white underpainting with oil paint.

More and more (below is 35×40 btw)

#arielmitchell

Wendy Fulenwider Liszt

is in Street Corner Conversations at McBride / Dillman with Sharon and Ariel Mitchell. approaches painting as a site of reconstitution. (From the gallery) “Drawing from experiences of impact, imbalance and illumination, she treats paint as both skin and medium, layering translucent and opaque color, then sanding, scraping and carving to reveal fiery forms.”

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Jack Whitten

Jack had a really great moment in 2025, and deservedly so- Helen Molesworth put his retrospective at the top of her “best shows” list (link is to her year end wrap on the David Zwirner pod “Dialogues”). I did not get to see The Messenger but I did see to see 9.11.01 shortly after MOMA reopened in 2020.

In the snobbish spirit of “I dug him before you guys,” I first blogged about Jack in 2019 to note a fantastic show at the Baltimore Museum of Art which (posthumously) included his work and many others* and which at the time, inspired me to create a “gallery” on Pinterest of Jack’s work.

I also really like to show my students, when I have occasion to teach, this wonderful (YouTube) Art21 video that includes some interview audio with Jack made while he is in his studio.

*I’ve previously blogged about a number of exhibits including above at BMOA, which center the practice of nonfigurative art work created by Black Americans. I’ll note that Black artists on this blog are not all of African descent, and, if you are interested in what artists from Africa are up to, I have a hashtag for that, too.

More (Wikipedia)

#jackwhitten

Hedda Sterne

I first blogged about Hedda in early 2020 because I was so over the moon to see MOMA give Hedda her due in their (at the time) new gallery reconfiguration. Hedda has a prominent place in Art History as the only woman Artist featured in Nina Leen’s iconic Life Magazine photograph of the New York Abstract Expressionist group’s “membership” (below).

Jason at Two Coats has words about the recent Dreamscapes at Van Doren Wexter.

I am continually in awe of the #9thstreetwomen* and their truly Modernist commitment to artistic practice- they always made work, even as their male counterparts (and spouses!) stole the limelight. *Speaking of the now well known tome, enjoy this interview (YouTube video in link) with author Mary Gabriel (I know I will).

#heddasterne

Rocío Sáenz

(From Iron Gallery in Chicago) With a career defined by experimentation and spatial exploration, Rocío Sáenz transforms her experiences into an artistic proposal that challenges boundaries. Her work has been exhibited across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, earning her accolades such as the Chihuahua Award in Arts and Sciences and the Pedro Coronel Painting Biennial. More

#rociosaenz

Germán Tagle

(From Aninat Galeria) In the crossroad where fiction and history meet, German Tagle has established a place of observation with the intention of catching in his paintings those narrative fragments that allow us to reread the territory where our main cultural icons lie, this is to say, all the output of diverse images taken from paintings, of advertisement, movies, anyplace we can recognize without even being sure we have even really seen it.

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#germantagle

Sylvia Snowden

Jasmine Weber at Hyperallergic notes (among other things) that the 83-year-old artist has dubbed her painterly detonations of color, which physically undulate from their surfaces, as “structural abstract expressionism.”

If you like paintings that “hover delicately between figuration and abstraction” check out Mary as well.
#sylviasnowden

Kylie Heidenheimer

Bill Arning notes over at Two Coats that Private Public Gallery has earned its reputation for mounting deeply considered exhibitions of painting that honor artists who have spent decades refining their own private grammars of mark and color, and that Kylie’s first solo exhibition there is fully in that lineage.

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Karin Davie

still makes luscious paintings (thanks Amanda at Two Coats). I’ve previously blogged about her work and made a Pinterest “gallery” (below is from the #armoryshow in 2020).

I remember that she was having her first good art world moment when I was in undergrad. It’s often weird what sticks in your head but I still remember a cover of Art in America with one of her paintings.

More (Brooklyn Rail 2006)

#karindavie

Allie McGhee

I wasn’t familiar with Allie until I saw below in an ArtNews article about updates to the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection*.

Allie McGhee has been a leading figure in the Detroit art scene since the 1960s. Initially a figurative painter, McGhee moved away from representation and toward the more universal abstract language he is best known for today. His mixed-media paintings, including sculptural works in which he folds, bends, and crumples the canvas, are notable for their signature arcing forms and brilliant washes of color.

*The DIA was among the first museums anywhere to build and exhibit a collection of African American art, which it began in 1943. In 2001 it became the first US museum to name a curator devoted to that field in Valerie J. Mercer, who still serves as the museum’s curator and head of African American art.  
#alliemcghee