Portraits

There are so many great profiles being written about artists and their shows that we thought we would start gathering them together in occasional posts under the Portraits rubric:

Peyton Takes Her Place

In advance of Elizabeth Peyton’s retrospective opening at the New Museum tomorrow, the New Yorker had a Calvin Tomkins story in the magazine and this slide show online.

Gilbert and George at the Brooklyn Museum

Holland Carter reviews the G&G retrospective in The New York Times. “Yet popular is not really the word for them. They’re too strange for that. And to perpetually temperature-taking art-world eyes, they have always stood a little outside the coolness loop, a tad beyond the pale, a touch too much.” [ . . . ]

“At the same time, for exactly these reasons, the show is a vivid experience. First look may be best look, but it’s a memorable look. And it poses a genuine love-it-or-hate-it proposition, something in short supply these days, but one these artists have been offering for years.”

Growing Up

Mary Heilmann knew everyone as a young artist. Dorothy Spears shows in the New York Times that everyone wants to know her now:

With her retrospective “To Be Someone” opening the final leg of its national tour at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Oct. 22, Ms. Heilmann, 68, can finally rest assured. Revealing that art, like youth, is subjective, Ellsworth Kelly, the 85-year-old master of hard-edged geometric abstraction, recently said, “I’ve always felt that Mary Heilmann is the best of the new abstractionists.” Mr. Kelly tops a Who’s Who of artist-admirers ranging from those straight out of art school to those who are institutions themselves.

In the last few years, however, Ms. Heilmann’s drippy, color-saturated abstractions have become even more mainstream. With their sly references to her favorite landscapes, pop songs, Navajo weavings, chairs and defiantly middlebrow ceramic dinnerware, they have appeared on the covers of Art in America and Artforum and even in Vogue, where two of her paintings ran alongside her portrait, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Apart from the New Museum show, a mini-retrospective of her paintings, “Some Pretty Colors,” is under way at the Zwirner & Wirth gallery, and shows are planned in January at both 303 Gallery sites in Chelsea. And that’s only in New York.