Sophie Barber at Alison Jacques

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A mutation, demanded by an increasingly virtual world, plants a flag in physicality, inflated and crusty. New harder forms of materiality required as we personally all desensitize to images. Still painting. (Minus the difficult corpulence of Gina Beavers.) An attempt to give warm tatters to cold images - distressing its denim. (So Wolfgang Tillmans makes sense.) A new nostalgia. A new reclaimed wood, new reclamation of images. Plastic technologies for. It's sort of the moral program of painting to do so. 

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gina Beavers, Materialphilia

Dorothea Tanning at Alison Jacques

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Symbols fraying into the abstraction that nurses innuendo. Is Frida Kahlo not forebear to Alice Tippit's ambiguous buttholes; is not Tanning and the ambiguity premising its surrealism, more than Frankenthaler, prescient in Sillman's bodied abstraction.

See too: Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins