Sally Grant
Art Historian. Curator. Writer.
Jenna Gribbon, What Am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You the Same, oil on linen, 2022.
“Queer Views | Old Masters”
Arthur (askarthur.art), June 2022
The temporary relocation of The Frick Collection to Madison Avenue has allowed for a refreshing reappraisal of its beloved holdings. One of the most enlivening outcomes of Frick Madison has been “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters.” For this project, four New York-based artists created a work in conversation with early-modern European masterpieces. In honor of Pride Month, and in advance of the first of a new series of Frick Open Nights on June 17, when the "Living Histories" artists will discuss their contribution, we take a look at what queer views these contemporary pieces propose, and how they help us see the Old Masters anew. …
Linda Alpern, Morning, gelatin silver print selenium toned, 2008.
“Empire of Water”
Arthur (askarthur.art), May 2022
Located in Sag Harbor, a historic whaling village at the far end of New York’s Long Island, The Church opened in 2021. A former Methodist church, the builidng was purchased by the artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik and magnificently restored to serve as an art exhibition space and artists’ residency. Its current exhibition, “Empire of Water,” is local and expansive in scope, reflecting both The Church’s setting in the Hamptons and our universal connection to water. …
Daniel Jospeh Martinez, Three Critiques* #3 The Post-Human Manifesto for the Future (detail), five photographs, 2022.
“Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It's Kept”
Arthur (askarthur.art), March 2022
At the preview of this year’s Whitney Biennial, Adam D. Weinberg—the museum’s Alice Pratt Brown Director—described the bi-yearly exhibition’s role “to showcase the current state of art in America.” For its latest iteration, which opens on April 6, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards have arranged an exhibition—nay, an adventure—that reveals just how diverse, wide-ranging, and fluid American art can be. …
Esther Bubley, Greyhound Terminal, NYC, 1947,gelatin silver print, 9 x 13". From the series “Bus Story,” 1947.
“1947, Simone de Beauvoir in America”
Artforum, January 2019
SOUS LES ETOILES GALLERY
100 Crosby Street #603, NYC
December 13, 2018–March 2, 2019
The opening line of America Day by Day (1948), Simone de Beauvoir’s diary of her US travels in 1947, conveys the French writer’s intense sense of anticipation at the beginning of her first visit to the New World: “Something is about to happen.” When Corinne Tapia, owner and director of Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, encountered the journal a number of years ago, she was struck by its visual quality, an aspect that she wanted to explore further. Now, over a decade later, Tapia has curated a homage to the book. The exhibition features more than sixty black-and-white photographs—most of which date to the year of de Beauvoir’s tour—by an array of photographers. …
“On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Australian Book Review Arts, October 2017
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its large-scale, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These are usually impressive, often enlightening. But sometimes it can be even more rewarding (and less exhausting) to visit a show on a much smaller scale. Such is the case at the moment at The Met, where six paintings by modern and contemporary Indigenous Australian artists are displayed in On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift. Installed in a room with four large windows overlooking Central Park – a deliberate choice by the curator, Maia Nuku – these magnificent works reference a very different landscape from the one visible through the glass. Yet the exhibition’s location skilfully acknowledges the cultural meaning of place that its paintings vitally express. ...
"Torre David #2" by Iwan Baan, 2011. Chromogenic print, 48 x 72 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles. © 2018 Iwan Baan.
“Transformative Eye of the Camera Turned on Architecture at Parrish”
Hamptons Art Hub, April 2018
The Parrish Art Museum’s latest exhibition, “Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture,” is an outstanding exploration of how the camera’s lens modifies the visual experience of built space. Including more than 50 works by 21 artists, the engaging exhibition is divided into three loosely thematic areas: Domestic Spaces, Cityscapes, and Public Places. ...
CY TWOMBLY, "Untitled (In Beauty it is finished)," 1983 - 2002 (detail). Acrylic, wax crayon, pencil and pen on handmade paper in unbound handmade book, 36 pages. Each page: 22 3/8 × 15 3/4 inches (56.8 × 40 cm). Collection Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian.
“A Cy Twombly Odyssey of Pictorial Exploration at Gagosian”
Hamptons Art Hub, March 2018
“In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951-2008,” the Cy Twombly exhibition currently on view at Gagosian on West 21st Street, is an appropriately expansive tribute to one of the great, and most abstruse, artists of post-war American abstraction.
A career-spanning installation, the show is presented in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Cy Twombly (1928-2011), and of the completion of the eight-volume Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings. To this end, the vastness of Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery is a fitting space in which to encounter the work of an artist deeply influenced by the storytelling richness of ancient epic and myth, and to be swept along on Twombly’s own odyssey of pictorial exploration. ...
"White Mountain" by Wayne Thiebaud, 1995. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Allan Stone Projects.
“The Pleasurable Melancholy of Wayne Thiebaud’s Landscapes”
Hamptons Art Hub, November 2017
[One of the 15 most popular stories of 2017 on Hamptons Art Hub]
To describe the landscapes of an acclaimed American artist known for his images of cakes and candy in terms of the language of food might seem clichéd. But on viewing the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) in “Land Survey” at Allan Stone Projects in Chelsea, the word delicious cannot help but come to mind. ...
"Assault On the Solar Plexus" by Lee Krasner, 1961. Oil on cotton duck, 81 x 58 inches. © 2017 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery.
“Krasner, Hockney and Sodi Works Brim with Vitality and Renewal”
Hamptons Art Hub, December 2017
A visit to the three spaces of the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea in New York City offers an enlivening education in the power of three of the backbones of traditional art-making: painting, drawing, and sculpture.
The Hamptons’ own Lee Krasner demonstrates the expressive possibilities of the first medium in “The Umber Paintings, 1959 – 1962,” while “David Hockney: Works on Paper, 1961 – 2009” provides a close-up view of the world of the beloved British painter, who is currently the subject of a major exhibition at The Met. In the plastic arts, the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi reveals the transfixing, restorative power of minimalist sculpture as seen through the lens of nature. ...
“British Painter Jenny Saville Responds to the Old (Male) Masters”
Ms. Magazine Blog, December 2015
Two parallel exhibitions are currently on view at the University of Oxford’s venerable Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice brings together masterpieces from the 16th to 18th century by some of the greatest early-modern Venetian artists, such as Titian, Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Running alongside this is a smaller collection of drawings by the contemporary British painter Jenny Saville (b. 1970), which respond to these earlier works. ...