Sputterances

Sputterances

Metro Pictures

New York, 519 West 24th Street

Considered among the most intriguing contemporary painters, Sanya Kantarovsky puts on his curatorial hat for a group exhibition at Metro Pictures, bringing together a group of intergenerational painters under a riveting concept. Stemming from Kantarovsky’s fascination for the work of Dutch painter René Daniëls, the exhibition expands on a complex, yet genuine perspective on painting as a creative and intellectual process. Used as a portmanteau expression by Daniëls, sputterance defines a sputter met with utterance. In painting, this duello between the impulse for self expression and the opposing obstacle bears a fruitful platform for creativity and visual abundance. 

Milton Avery Mother’s Boy, 1944 oil on canvas Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

From Milton Avery’s subliminal Mother’s Boy that dates back to 1944 to Maria Lassnig’s eerie 2001 work Im Netz, the paintings deliver a stylistic feast overall, while orchestrating an alternative approach to the urge to paint. Apparent in work by painters ranging from contemporary names such as Paulina Olowska and Amalie von Wulffen to pioneers like Charles Burchfield and Jacob Lawrence, the exhibition captures the tempestuous nature of being a painter and taming the complexities and subtleties embedded in interpreting the reality. 

“Daniëls may be best known for paintings depicting simple architectural spaces that, rendered in perspective, look like bowties and often have monochromatic paintings hanging on the walls. Daniëls repeated this motif again and again in more or less detail, an approach that speaks less to some anti-subjective seriality than it does to a searching impulse[…]”, notes William S. Smith in his 2014 Art in America article about Daniëls’s work.

On view through April 22, 2017