Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins

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The fourth wall's plane, the painting, that's always foreboding in Halvorsen's is literalized here in the NO TRESPASSING sign which, as the PR mentions, "the painting metaphorically extends the boundary line" i.e for all representational painting's ostensible window-into-ness it's still a wall we're racking our brains bashing our heads against. Mark Tansey's "A Short History of Modernist painting" comes to mind, or taking the measure of Plimack Mangold, the point being this will never not be fun, placing the sticker on the glass to make the window itself visible. It's difficult to see the painting for its frame, the image as its pixels, the words as its collection of letterforms, the painting is the barrier, making a better door than a window as it were, check out my paint.  Paintings aren't culturally valued for their ability to represent, we have images to do that for us, but a signifiers of "painting" - that most symbolically loaded cultural form - and so its important to highlight your brushstrokes, your smears, the act of making it. Gerhard Richter's dragged abstractions sell for way more than the illusions.

Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins

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[A press release to melt steel girds.]

The silhouettes lacking color were assigned it through expectations of their inhabited shape: Colorless and projected with a hue-as-designation through our own cultural assumptions, achromic yet colored, the metaphors manifold and rife. Now Walker paints in the colors like an assignation, assigning of her own hand what had been ours to.  What is noticeable is the umber never touches its outline, it's held within or smeared on top. The pale fleshes melt, meld with their surroundings, perhaps simply because paleness is considered to be standard, the backdrop, blend into it.


 

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, a signature piece requisite the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about. A signature painting means "in the style of oneself" which sounds affected and self-conscious in a way popular 8 years ago that we thought Sillman had absorbed and moved us past, but here we are: "becoming" is literalized in the animation cell paintings, painting subordinate to precedent and subsequent - provisional - another painting-buzz Sillman had once passed. The most becoming paintings here are the small ones in which the self seems at stake, no Sillman line to hold the Sillman form she once insisted the body-politic of, instead a sort of becoming Frankenthaler, an interesting thing for Sillman to become someone else, not-Sillman.


See too: Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Sheila Hicks at Sikkema Jenkins

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While the larger assert themselves through a sort of program exhausted, and big, the small seem yet full with their potential, mysterious and replete; and not yet farmed for harvest, time + material. No doubt Hicks graduating in of an era not particularly known for much besides measuring competitions in some ways shaped the product.