Margarita

2011-08-09T22:54:00.004-04:00

Girls on the run

2011-03-29T21:49:00.002-04:00

Continuing in the vein of figuration, examples of what may represent modest painting in contemporary art include the many small representational works with an illustrational character. These include works whose fantasy-oriented narrative derives some of its pleasures from the history of book illustration. In works by artists such as Marcel Dzama, Amy Cutler, and the emerging artist James Franklin, small figures find themselves in situations that range from the banal--strange things happening around a water cooler--to the fantastical, such as fairy-tale transformations affecting young people living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or intersections with creatures from the forest of Grimms' tales. The surfaces are carefully tuned, the expressive tone of the narrative is subdued, and there is an element of the childlike in the drawing style. The presumed modesty serves a niche in the market for small works scaled for apartment living and the collector of intermediate means. It may also be an embodiment of a generation's doubts or fears about the expressions of un-ironic emotion and of a contemporary interest in the decorative and the unintellectual--a loss of belief in "isms" at a time when all "isms" are available. However, these works' charm can occasionally verge toward the cute or the smug, with an interesting correspondence to some recent trends in New Yorker cartoons: minimally delineated, inexpressive young people in unclear narrative circumstances although clearly privileged situations. --Mira Schor, from "Modest Painting" in A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Duke UP, 2009)

Failure

2011-02-13T19:12:00.006-05:00

Hi

2010-10-05T17:09:00.002-04:00

Goodbye summer

2010-09-20T22:34:00.003-04:00

Untitled

2008-02-18T21:12:00.000-05:00

Plants

2007-12-16T11:48:00.000-05:00

Long Pose #2

2007-10-25T21:59:00.001-04:00

Muscles

2007-10-13T10:28:00.001-04:00

Long Pose

2007-09-30T11:14:00.001-04:00

Nemirovsky washing machine

2007-09-16T10:49:00.001-04:00

comics

2007-05-13T14:17:00.000-04:00

commute unfinished

2007-04-15T09:45:00.000-04:00

drawings 2

2007-01-20T23:19:00.000-05:00

Tool

2006-12-04T01:20:00.000-05:00

drawings 1

2006-09-10T14:28:00.000-04:00

Museum

2006-08-02T00:21:00.000-04:00

O

2006-07-31T13:41:00.000-04:00

Ewe

2006-07-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

Butler Library

2006-07-10T18:08:00.000-04:00

statues

2006-07-09T18:21:00.000-04:00

Bike

2006-05-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

Stolen Bike