For my generation (say, 18-34, demographically speaking, particularly males), early video games are source of intense nostalgia and affection. The lurid, eyeball-searing color and bizarre cartoon logic of those games suggest an era of fruitful experimentation in a medium that had yet to establish conventions. Possibly, the industry had yet to be professionalized; game-design was […]

Alexandra Rutsch is a compelling New York visual artist who takes personal risks by exploring her and her family’s existence in stark, revealing, even biological detail. Recently, Alexandra and I had a candid Q&A about this overlap between her art and life.Milton Fletcher: What are the current pieces you are working on?Alexandra Rutsch: I’ve been […]

Miguel Gutierrez storms on the raw stage of Dance Theater Workshop to U2’s New Year’s Day—a sign of the rebirth to follow—to set up for his show. The clothes come on and off as he references his past works through video, including a dance around a Christmas tree. He pushes iron before a mirror and […]

While the presence of foreign-born artists has impacted and defined contemporary British art, this is neither an isolated or new occurrence.  Prior to the 18th century, British art had long been dominated by a series of foreign-born artists. Globally, post-war Modernism has been informed and shaped by artists moving independently or through necessity to foreign […]

Fitting into spaces is what people who dwell in cities, especially NYC, do. We fit a lifetime of accumulated matter into minuscule apartments, bodies into subway cars, varying degrees of education and talent into varying degrees of annoying jobs. We fit booze into lunch hours and miniature dogs into purses. We structure lives around a […]

The origins of these paintings began with my black and white “Nowhere” paintings, which depicted the lonely haunted backwoods in a non-specific time and place. I have always been heavily influenced by black and white horror movies, which presented a subtle yet palatable vision of anxiety and suspense. The environment itself is culled from such […]

Artist Irina Nakhova exists in the liminal space between places and identities.  She is a Russian artist now living primarily in America who still spends extended periods in Europe and Russia. She was raised under the Soviet system, a member of the close-knit avant-garde there who experienced the freedom that followed Perestroika. She is an […]

Birgir Snaebjörn Birgisson (b. 1966) is an Icelandic figurative painter whose work hints at minimal thoughts as presented by Kasimir Malevich in the 1920s. An artist that over a period of time took his works through a cleansing process by rejecting duality and embracing absence of color, pure white, pure light. Yet, different from the […]

And if all art were just one big joke? If the painters sacred to tradition were just pranksters, and there were as many canvases as jokes? The Occident was tempted by this: Wittgenstein dreamt of a book of philosophy that consisted solely of jokes. Painters like Leger, Dubuffet, Warhol and others delighted in jokes. And […]

In Chinese, there is an expression: “The whole world is drunk and I alone am sober.” This phrase conveys something of the poignancy and conflict of the observer who stands outside the group, looking in: one who may benefit from the clarity of perspective but also feels the sting of estrangement. Wang Ningde is an […]