Under the radar
Chandrika Marla
Though they are profoundly simple in composition, Chandrika Marla’s paintings contain an abundance of references. They offer up allusions to the landscape and to the curves of the female body, and they find their antecedents in any number of minimalist and color field...
Carole Kunstadt
A strong interest in craftsmanship underlies Carole Kunstadt’s quirky sculptures and two-dimensional works, and though her career has taken a few detours over the years, she has maintained a respect for materials and execution, even as she is tearing apart old books...
Leslie Parke
More so than most, Leslie Parke grew up with abundant encouragement to embark on the path of an artist. At the age of five she was studying art books on the living room floor of the family house in Scarsdale, NY. (“I had the childish desire to live inside a painting...
Tom Martinelli
Tom Martinelli’s artistic journey might be said to begin with a real journey, when he and some friends repurposed a New York City school bus and drove it west as far as Tucson, AZ, in 1971. Seventeen years old and just out of high school, he and his sidekicks were on...
Barbara Kemp Cowlin
One way or another, many artists end up following a circuitous path to maturity, but Barbara Kemp Cowlin seems to have stumbled across more landmines and detours than most, partly because of fate, partly because of the times in which she came of age. She moved...
James Deeb
Though he has been painting and drawing them for years, James Deeb’s cast of ghoulish characters seem especially attuned to the present moment. Realized in thick impasto and often sickly color, they are bloated, demonic, smug, and menacing. They have obvious...
Anne Gilman
Anne Gilman’s oversized scroll “drawings” unfurl across the floor, against walls, from the ceiling, and sometimes over tabletops with a graceful ease that belies their sometimes anguished or anxious content. I put drawings in quotes because there is so much more going...
Lisa Blas
At the start of each week, subscribers to Lisa Blas’s RSS feed called “Monday’s Image” are treated to a visual puzzle, an intriguing exercise in compare and contrast, an introduction to a work by an artist you’ve probably never heard of before (paired with the front...
Ira Wright
There are many artists who might be said to channel the impulses of childhood into their mature works—Picasso, Klee, and Dubuffet are three who come to mind. But few I know of carry over a talisman from their earlier years as an important subject in their so-called...
Valeri Larko
For more than three decades, Valeri Larko has celebrated the strange appeal of some of the most desolate spots around her home and studio. Up until she moved to New Rochelle, NY, her favorite stomping grounds were close to Jersey City, NJ. “The beauty and the grit I...
Claire Lieberman
For most of her career, Claire Lieberman’s sculpture has walked a fine line between beauty and danger, seduction and destruction. Take her last show at Massey Klein Gallery in New York, for example, aptly titled “Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.” Elegantly...
Mila Dau
Two preoccupations have remained constant in the art of Mila Dau as it has unfolded in the last 25 years: a fascination with people and a love of architectural spaces, specifically the interiors of museums, here and in Europe. It seems inevitable that the two were...
Photo credit: Joe Fig Self Portrait: Collinsville, 12 ½” x 31 ½” x 21”, Mixed Media, 2013. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery