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Emilio Sanchez reveals beauty in unremarkable landscapes
Untitled, Bronx Multi-Colored Storefront (Image courtesy the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia) Sunlight does peculiar things in the city. It overwhelms surfaces in ways it can’t when there’s more organic matter around to soak up the glare or scatter it into chaotic shadows. The portfolio of Cuban-American painter Emilio Sanchez contains […]
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Mercedes Helnwein "The Beautiful Person"; Second Street Gallery; Through May 28
Mercedes Helnwein’s “The Beautiful Person” provokes and questions observers at Second Street Gallery. (Courtesy the artist) What are you looking at? A stern portrait’s half-lidded stare seems to ask this the moment anyone walks through the door at Second Street Gallery. And in artist Mercedes Helnwein’s show “The Beautiful Person,” it’s a question well worth […]
Paramount event turns Renaissance art digital
Tickets to view “The Last Supper” sell out two months in advance. Visitors are permitted to view Leonardo da Vinci’s master work after a multi-step decontamination process and then only for 15 minutes. If there’s ever a case for viewing artwork remotely, the deteriorating 514-year-old refectory wall fresco in Milan makes it. “Leonardo Live”—something of […]
Review: Laura Ball’s Journey at Second Street Gallery
Watercolors are unruly. Each wet stroke wants to bleed into its own erratic shoreline from the brush’s edge as the pigment sinks to varying depths in the paper.
ART: "The New Members Show"; McGuffey Art Center; through January 29
Art sounds a lot like remodeling. Hammers clunk. Power tools grind. People duck into the next room to help lift things.
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Review: "Catch the Baby" by Rosamond Casey at Chroma Projects
Art often gives us a chance to root around in someone else’s heart, but rarely does it challenge us to examine our own. Rosamond Casey’s interactive game “Catch the Baby” is featured at Chroma Projects through November 26, along with paintings by Lindsay Heider Diamond. “Catch the Baby,” a two-player game at the center of […]
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Writing on the walls
Most people with English rattling around their heads give little thought to what their language looks like. Typeface and handwriting vanish quickly behind the meaning of the words they form. It’s a playful change of pace, then, to study the work of Noriko Maeda, whose Japanese calligraphy, on view through September at Warm Springs Gallery, […]
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Disparate times
Featuring dead birds, underwater towns, and ranch hands dining in the pastel dusk, Matt Kleberg’s paintings, now hanging at JohnSarahJohn, seem to conceal rich tales just beneath the thin layers of oil. Look closely at the finch outlined by the cream and brown stripes of “Right Now But Not Yet,” and you’ll see the base layers of paint from an earlier version of the ranch piece hung beside it.
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"Visuality"; The Second Street Gallery; Through May 28
In a culture awash with pointless crap to look at, still-life painting has never been more relevant.
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John McCarthy: A retrospective; Les Yeux Du Monde; April 22-June 5
McCarthy studied anything he could get his hands on—exhibits, criticism, artist biographies—that might help him use color to draw out the secrets of a shadowy tree line or a fiery lake at dusk.
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"Small Breaches in the Firmament," Chroma Projects Art Laboratory, Through April 30
At the edge of our grasp of the universe, where scientific understanding fades into the dark expanse of the unknown, artists have long stepped in to give form to the things that separate earth from the heavens. In ancient cultures’ religious imagery or in the confrontational weirdness of modernism, art has a way of picking […]
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Southern Views Southern Photographers; UVA Art Museum; Through June 12
There remains a mystique about the South. In its pride and its wilderness. Its sins and its secrets. Even the boundary-dulling effluent of popular culture has not washed away the things that make life in the rural South distinct. Photographs by UVA’s Pamela Pecchio like “On Longing” are shown alongside other works that celebrate the […]
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"Patternation" by Reko Rennie; The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection; Through April 4
If you’ve been seeing pink kangaroos lately, fear not. Your brain isn’t dissolving into a late-winter mush. It’s merely snagging glimpses of Australian artist Reko Rennie’s imitable work about town. If the Aboriginal images stenciled onto construction sites, fluorescent bumper stickers or life-sized kangaroo screen prints brightening up empty storefronts have caught your attention, take […]
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New Members Show; McGuffey Art Center; through January 30
McGuffey Art Center excels at hauling Charlottesville's rich seams of artistic talent to the surface during its yearly New Members Show.
Clay Witt's "Ultra Marine,"; Les Yeux du Monde; Through January 2
Clay Witt pushes his materials to their natural limits in his new show.
"Serial Thrillers" at PVCC
It takes a deft mind to craft intrigue from a pile of random photos or a box of junk. Anonymous faces gaze from the walls of PVCC’s north gallery, sharing a hallway with improbable cairns of corroded landfill fodder and ceramic. Yet each piece in “Serial Thrillers”—on display through Nov. 3 by noted local artists […]
"Site Singularity"; Suzanna Fields, J.T. Kirkland and Sean Lundgren; The Bridge/PAI, through September 25
The walls are alive at The Bridge this month, colonized by forms from Suzanna Fields, J.T. Kirkland and Sean Lundgren crafted specifically to meld with the venue’s sparse main room. Their conceptual creations demand a sturdy attention span, but look closely and your patience will be rewarded. At one end, Richmond’s Fields coated the drywall […]