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The paintings in Shelley Horton-Trippe’s recent show Carbon are the best of her career. The emotional authority they possess is so direct, damning, and volcanic that the viewer can only step back in amazed silence and let the artist’s sense of truth pour down in waves of metaphorical light, sweet crude.

It is as if these mostly black paintings, with their patches and particles of heart-grabbing, ravishing color, were conceived and executed in a series of convulsive, life-and-death struggles. And for all intents and purposes, they were. If in this work Horton-Trippe plays the role of the...

Friday, August 1, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

By the time this photo of our planet was taken, the year 1968 was just about over. As the Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon—getting ever closer to that one giant step for mankind, which would take place in 1969—the astronauts could justifiably allow themselves a few moments of detachment from all our planetary highjinks and hoopla, whether good or bad. Looking at this spectacular Earth at a distance doing its gravitational balancing act, who would suspect the amount of energy being expended there in terms of war and peace, political maneuverings, extravagant fantasies, life on the...

Friday, August 1, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

Many of the photographs in Jungjin Lee’s current exhibition are images taken in New Mexico—a defunct school bus stranded out in the middle of a field in Taos; an old ruin whose ceiling is open to the sky; a trailer with a stag head over the door and next to a vintage pick-up truck; flea market drapery blowing in the wind. Some of the images were also photographed on the California coast and some in Korea, but they all partake of the same mood and tonal range, and all the work can be traced back to Lee’s essential preoccupation with abstraction.

It is as if Lee brought each image into...

Friday, August 1, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

In Andrea Kalinowski’s series of mixed-media paintings, Society of Women, her processes threaten to overshadow her content. There is also a problem with her use of patterns which are too busy and can seem claustrophobic. While mimicking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folk art landscapes and genre scenes, the backgrounds tend to trump the points Kalinowski wishes to make in her work. The artist—using wallpaper-derived patterns, silhouetted figures, pieces of elegantly scripted text, ink, plaster, and acrylic—attempts to braid together historical vignettes of people loosely anchored in...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

Flux is brilliant, gorgeous, generous, eye opening, guaranteed to be a crowd pleaser, and is full of surprises, subtleties, and the wildly imagined. In short, while I risk being accused of hyperbole, when you see it for yourself, you will, I think, agree. Paradoxically, I have never been particularly drawn to the ways that glass can be melted, cast, tinted, sandblasted, blown, laminated, filled with neon, slumped, or crushed. But that was then, this is now.

Along with the international exotica of names like Tashio Iezumi, Dante Marioni, Jaroslav Matouš, Stanislava Grebeníková, Toots...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

In Perlucere, Margeaux’s current show of photographic work, two separate but related series investigate methods of layering information, degrees of translucency, the effects of scale, and metaphors of absence and presence, fragility and strength.

In her exquisite Apparition series, the artist layers a printed image on paper of a model in various poses behind an image of two dark metal chairs printed on Mylar. These photographs are not large, but the formal elements juxtaposed with the cerebral ones convey a potent sense of gravitas—at once alluring and disquieting. We are being drawn into...

Thursday, June 5, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

I have always looked forward to seeing the graduate shows at UNM, and I have reviewed a few of them for this magazine. The overall quality of the work and the thinking behind it were generally impressive. It seemed that the students had prepared themselves well for the arduous task of assuming a place in the contemporary art world. And I never came away from a graduate exhibition feeling as dismayed as I did this year.

There is such an exciting climate in the art world right now. It’s a great time for artists to blur boundaries and push the limits of any given medium or combination of...

Thursday, June 5, 2008
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine

Museum of Fine Arts
Dózsa György utca 41, Budapest, Hungary

I want something more concise, more simple, more serious; I want more soul and more love and more heart. Vincent van Gogh, from a letter dated 11 December 1882

Is there anything left to say about Vincent van Gogh? Does everyone know his favorite color was yellow? That he cut off all, or a part, of his ear and gave it to a prostitute? That he was a manic-depressive? That he painted one of the most perfect works in the history of art? It’s called The Starry Night yet the artist himself felt it was a failure because he had been...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Diane Armitage • THE magazine