Art Review: Chris Martin's Spiritualist-Abstract Search for a New Medium
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Martha Schwendener
NEW YORK---Chris Martin’s first solo show at Anton Kern feels like a breakthrough, although he’s been painting for decades. Many include a shimmery dusting of glitter, and not just any glitter: the holographic kind used by showgirls in Las Vegas, whose living depends on transfixing their audience. Mr. Martin (who has a concurrent show at Half Gallery on the Upper East Side) traffics in a different kind of transfixion: the slower, seismic kind that painting affords. Mr. Martin continues the abstract tradition of artists like Forrest Bess and Paul Feeley, but also the spiritualist-abstract one of Hilma af Klimt, Lee Mullican, Agnes Martin and Helmut Federle. He’s not just painting, but searching for a way to “be” painting, to experience rather than understand the medium; to be a medium himself. [link]
By Martha Schwendener
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| A spiritual tradition: an untitled work by Chris Martin. Credit Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York |