Paul Pagk

Apr 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Rachel Wetzler |Jan Tumlir |Clifford Owens |Paul Pagk

A reflection on the art of Mark RothkoWALKING THROUGH “MARK ROTHKO” at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton this past October, I felt in body, mind, and surely soul the magical embrace of his paintings, their physical presence, their frontal pictoriality letting me into their depths, and a powerful affirmation of the horizon between heaven and earth. Rothko’s color defines shapes, his shapes define boundaries, and these boundaries are rarely hard.

Apr 1, 2024 | artforum.com | J. HOBERMAN |Lola Kramer |Molly Warnock |Paul Pagk

Bill Griffith’s Three Rocks and the cult of NancyUNIVERSALIZING HISTORIANS have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy. For one thing, Bushmiller’s reductive, repeatedly iterated forms established their own pictography.

Jan 31, 2023 | artforum.com | Sarah Schulman |Lola Kramer |Molly Warnock |Paul Pagk

THERE ARE HISTORICAL MOMENTS that transform the industry standard, and sometimes they have deep, traceable roots. An opportunity to understand this process is provided by an exhibition of artist Nicole Eisenman’s work opening in March at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst.