Sarah Lutz at Lohin Geduld

Burst, 2009

New work by painter Sara Lutz is going up at Lohin Geduld tommorow, and rather than noting the fact and tossing the release per my usual press release practice I wanted to share her work. Because of the gorgeous colors and textures of her oils, and because of the richness and playfulness of her work, I was hoping one of my lovely blog readers would go in my stead and report back with more images!

This is your mission should you choose to accept it.

Carlos Quintana

La cosa está mala 2008


Contemporary art in Cuba seems on one hand to be flourishing, with studios all over Havana asking you to come in and have a look at some brightly-colored, expressive paintings– all done rather skillfully. They start to look the same after a while. However, Carlos Quintana had a show up (in a proper gallery, no less) that really impressed me.

Quintana was born in Havana in 1966 and went to art school there. I found that he moved to Madrid, where he currently resides, in 1993. The large canvases with bright washes and splatters of color that he uses belie the darker undercurrent of his figures. In the work below, he slaps on paint in a manner more violent than cartoonish, and the size of the canvas (79 x 79 in.) can overwhelm. Yet the Senorita’s innocent expression and sea foam green dress add a wistfulness to the composition.

Senorita Elegante 2008

More, and better images of, his work on Artnet.

Naked And Nude


Artists, listen up. Don’t change your art–just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.

Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don’t worry though, this could work if you aren’t (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.

In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don’t even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people’s, ahem, hackles.