Morgan Taylor's Artcritical Reviews: Lewis and Geiger at New York Galleries

Morgan Taylor, an author at artcritical, reviews two New York exhibitions. At Tibor deNagy Gallery (724 Fifth Avenue, October 4 to November 10, 2007), Phillip Geiger's 2006 painting 'A Different Shirt' depicts a tabletop with cake and sunflowers, with a young woman turning away from the viewer. Taylor praises the grainy, opaque paint surfaces and austere earth palette, noting an unfashionable non-ironic desire for quality. At Salander O'Reilly Galleries (20 East 79 Street, June 1 to June 23, 2006), Taylor celebrates the audacious, austere, muscular canvases of a 90-year-old Abstract Expressionist veteran, highlighting learned references from art history and photography. The review emphasizes the artist's authoritative skill in painting real, rich, crystalline light combined with muscular composition. Taylor also notes that mid-20th-century US art produced a wider range of styles than acknowledged, with critical preference for abstraction obscuring achievements of many good artists.