Charissa N. Terranova

In hailing Lucian Freud as “the Ingres of existentialism” mid-last century, the British art critic Herbert Read hit the descriptive mark with great precision. Read’s naming suggests opposites that have not so much been imperiously forced but organically birthed together. In Freud this meant a thorough punctiliousness cut with an anarchist [...]

The human figure remains a persuasive vehicle for the expression of fathomless doubt, hard skepticism, and existential uncertainty about the world. While perhaps something of a straw man argument today, the polemic over the “figurative” and “abstract” in art [...]

Events in real time are fluid, dynamic, and spontaneous. Some philosophers call this quality “lived,” as in “the...

Born and bred in New York City, artist Glenn Ligon infuses the sumptuous surfaces of his paintings with the iconoclasm of a smart, young, super intelligent malcontent. Though he works across media with great agility [...]