Painting in Silver and Noir: Q+A With Jacqueline Humphries

Over the course of a more than two decade-long career, Jacqueline Humphries has approached every canvas with the intent to mess it up. She sees its blank white form as the perfect last painting, and she's nowhere near her last. Lately, the artist has been covering and uncovering her canvases with lurid veils of paint in signature metallic, washing them out, scraping at them, smudging them, and then re-painting all over them again. The traces of these gestures resurrect various historicized tropes of abstraction-fields of expressionist marks are frequently layered upon chilly monochromes, representing the painting's version of personality shopping in its search to find itself.
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The Fine Print: Q+A With Martin Wilner

I first saw Martin Wilner's work in 2005 at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. I was particularly struck by a notebook-sized drawing in which Wilner documented his impressions of a trip he and his Holocaust-survivor parents made to Poland, trying to find the stuff that people who've lived to see the other side of something terrible can never find: reasons, the past, closure. The experience didn't yield what anybody expected; for Wilner it was something on the order of an emotional disaster. The drawing, however, was a success. I walked up to the gallery's director, Joe Amrhein, gave him my phone number, and told him, "Tell this guy to call me—we have a lot to talk about." Our friendship began a couple of weeks later.

Wilner and I have talked about a lot of things since. There's no one quite like him for dispelling your anxieties about the world, while affirming your right to feel anxious in the first place. Maybe it comes from the fact that he's spent years making emotive diaristic drawings while maintaining an unjaundiced eye on the world at large; maybe it's because, as a practicing psychiatrist, he's seen it all. (A specialist in treating Holocaust survivors, he's had to scale back his practice of late to make more time for his art.)
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Color Content: Q+A With Jonas Burgert

American Beauty: Q+A With Co-Curator of Tom Wesselmann Show

How is it that a canonical American Pop artist is having his first North American retrospective only now? "Beyond Pop: Tom Wesselmann" opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) on May 19.

There have been monographs, notably the artist's own autobiography-cum-artist's book, written in 1980 under the name Slim Stealingworth, and art historian John Wilmerding's 2008 volume. A retrospective of Wesselmann's work traveled in Japan and Europe from 1993–97. But, surprisingly, this is the artist's first full-dress retrospective on these shores, some eight years after his death.
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