On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait
John Vincler examines Michaël Borremans’s 2020 painting ‘Study for Bird.’
John Vincler
Daily
On Returning: Gerhard Richter, New York, and Birds
What can art offer us after the events of the past year?
On Desolation: Vija Celmins’s Gray
Open sea water seen from above. Star-filled skies. Stones. Gray after gray: from the graphite of pencils, charcoal on paper and its erasure, oil paint in layer after layer of deep, smooth near-black.
On Line: The Pulse of Agnes Martin
The paintings that burrow their way in are most often the ones I didn’t expect to impress me.
On Excavation: The Paintings of Mark Bradford
Why did Bradford’s paintings feel so familiar to me? I had never seen them before.
On Wingspan: Joan Mitchell’s Reach
I’ve been struggling with a question: why are Joan Mitchell’s paintings important now?
Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing
After we acknowledge it is writing that cannot be read, how is it that we then go about reading it? I wrote this question down in my notebook after first seeing Renee Gladman’s volume of collected drawings, Prose Architectures, in a booksho…
A Private Literature
Seeing manuscripts after Susan Howe. “Emerging from an Abyss, and re-entering it that is Life, is it not, Dear?”—a sentence written by Emily Dickinson, most likely in the year before her death, in a letter to her sister-in-law. The sentence a…