Andrew Paul Woolbright
Andrew Paul Woolbright is an artist, gallerist, and Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Woolbright is an MFA graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in painting and is the director of the Lower East Side Gallery Below Grand. He currently teaches at Pratt and School of Visual Arts in New York.
The Potential Worldings of the Kitbash
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe artist and critic Jesse Murry described a breath that makes possible another breath. How can our movements allow for other movements? As artists, how can our practices extend space for others as much as it asks for space; and give language and poetry to others as much as it asks for those things. Ive been told I wear many hats, and I want to address the why of it for the first time, while also bringing together a small vibrancy of others who share in strange navigations and similar obligations with me.
In Conversation
Spencer Sweeney with Andrew Woolbright
In early May, Spencer Sweeneys exhibition Perfect opened at the Brant Foundation. The drawings and paintings that spanned across the two floors of the foundation represented fifteen years of work and achieved the depth and dimension of both a retrospective and a concert . When the energy finally settled from the opening, we talked in his studio, where I found myself surrounded by the same palpable excitement and energy captured at the Brant. Next to his drums and guitars, and flanked by a ring of booming paintings still in progress, we discussed the shared spaces of music and painting, how painting can be used to anticipate and store the energy of an announcement, and how self-portraits can hold the tension of contradictions to emanate and reflect the soul.
In Conversation
Oscar yi Hou with Andrew Woolbright
In Oscars portraiture, the experience is encrypted, withheld, intimate, kept private between the artist and the subject. It is elusive when it needs to be, inviting when it needs to be. It is a language of survival that Oscar has developed to mine and understand his own labor, and reflect the visage of the spectator back at them through mirrors. It holds an account, while finding moments of ceremony for communities and people that need itdeserve it.
Dr. Charles Smith
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightTheres an enchantment one feels with Dr. Charles Smiths work. Whether it is the sheer expanse of his world building or the peculiar levity he has developed as an aesthetic, it can prove challenging to interpret his practice beyond the initial impact of its immersive charm.
Angel Otero: Swimming Where Time Was
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThere may be no better example of a product of Chicagos transgression, specifically the ethos of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), than Angel Otero.
John Tursi: New Works
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIn John Tursi's New Works at Ricco/Maresca, the artist cultivates a sense of movement and psychedelic animation through dense repetition. Simple shapes are plaited into larger patterns that Tursi combines into machinic bodies. Each figure evokes pulsating Broadyway Boogie-Woogies of movement, that systematize the body into reeling conveyor belts of synapse.
Jan-Ole Schiemann: New Paintings
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIn New Paintings at Kasmin Gallery, Jan-Ole Schiemann utilizes a segmented compositional structure to annotate different modes of mark marking. The artist makes extensive use of pastiche within the gaps of the picture plane, in a process that disconnects signs from the literalness of representation.
Emmanuel Louisnord Desir: Ashes of Zion
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIn Emmanuel Louisnord Desirs Ashes of Zion, painting and sculpture employ a skeuomorphic glitching of material to address biblical stories and collective histories. The work is remarkably attuned to the American vernacular, but the energy of it builds out of the artists ability to produce softness in the material resistance of wood. Desir gives us an allegorical metanarrative that begins with the garden and ends with the fall of Babylon.
Matthew Day Jackson: Against Nature
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, a book on the work of Albert Bierstadt, René Daumals Mount Analogue, and Roy Gallants Our Universe are arranged along the front desk of Pace. While these books index the aesthetics of Matthew Day Jacksons exhibition, it is Huysmanss Against Nature that inspired the shows title, and its protagonist, the isolated collector of extravagance Des Esseintes, who acts as its aegis.
Guim Tió: Roots
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWe see the figures that populate the settings of Guim Tiós Roots far off. The artist evokes the unlearning that the land can do to our bodiesand the unforming of identity that happens when we find ourselves in foreign lands.
Rachel Wolf: My My My Tintals and Fishscales
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhile the archival impulse deals with the canon of majoritarian culture on its own terms and with its own language, provisional sculpture provides a visual alterity of the marginal that has always run parallel to ita vibrant language of ordering and piecing together what has been broken.
Judith Linhares: Banshee Sunrise
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightBanshee Sunrise, Linhare’s second solo exhibition with P.P.O.W., solidifies her painterly presence and influence, specifically the important connection she has been able to draw between the figure and Abstract Expressionism through a phenomenological turn within representational work since the late seventies and eighties.
Mala Iqbal: Shape Shifting in the Outer Boroughs and Its Effects on the Travelers Perception of the Midnight Sky
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIqbal concretizes the momentary but vivid perceptions of strangers we capture in crowdsthe tangible effects of faces, of fading voices, of the colors and silhouettes of clothingwhile recording the translucent uncertainty of sightings that our memory is unable to make more permanent.
Nicky Nodjoumi: We the Witnesses
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhat is exhaustible versus what is inexhaustible comes to mind in Nicky Nodjoumis We the Witnesses at Helena Anrather. Newsprint is exhaustible. The images that circulate within newspapers, the ones that swarm around events, elicit quick shocks of something limbic but rarely have permanence past the next days issue.
Ouattara Watts: Paintings
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightTathata is a Buddhist sentiment that translates roughly to the suchness of things. In practice, its trying to understand the essence of something before words can circumscribe it. For forty years, Ouattara Watts has similarly resisted being assimilated or codified. His exhibition Paintings, currently on view at Karma, reveals a dedicated and thoughtful practice of painting that can only be achieved through the experiences of a world traveler.
Jan Baracz: Mutinys Darling
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightJan Baraczs exhibition Mutinys Darling at Peninsula Art Space provides a map of the overlooked. The artist utilizes materials marked by subtlety, favoring an inconspicuous tonality that exists somewhere between the woodshed and the boathouse, to address the impinged and imperceptible experience of traversing the ordinary.
Ron Gorchov: Watercolors 19681980
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe exhibition provides the unique experience to see where Gorchov expands the saddle into more of a field, plays at the boundaries, attempts to relate it more directly to the edge of the paper through trial and error, before finally settling on his aesthetic.
Ted Gahl: Le Goon
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightTed Gahls Le Goon at Harkawik picks the plangent chords and stirs the submerged chromas of terra melancholia. Melancholia, as opposed to anhedonia, conjures a sensual pleasure within the somber. While his paintings dont seem to exist in the present, they also dont seem to be nostalgic for another time, instead dealing with some time outside of time.
Sophia Narrett: Carried by Wonder
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhen everything is adornment it becomes a critical gesture, a self-negation, a reflexive desire that suspends us forever in the moment of the close Victorian look. When the dream becomes too romantic or too dreamy, it shakes us awake. Narrett is able to generate a transcendent interiority on the scale of Emily Dickinson, where self confinement becomes transgressed, drawn and redrawn, to inscribe it within fantasy before breaking its illusion.
Tim Brawner: Glad Tidings
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightTim Brawners Glad Tidings at Management sustains horror past its breaking point. In his exploration of genre through the passages of B-movie horror reels and its more recent evolution into online creepypasta, the artist is able to fixate on the tremulous imagery of jumpscares and translate a clever act of self-negation into painting. What is shed, what is stayed, and what new tension is currently relayed?
Jarrett Key: from the ground, up
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightJarrett Key is interested in the slow, germinating speed of folklore and the gradual repetition needed for world-building.
Mark Laver: Within
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightMark Lavers Within at Ricco/Maresca approaches the landscape through a radical subjectivity that blurs the boundary separating nature itself from our perception of it.
THE ÖMEN: Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe actor Ben Becker is playing Albert Oehlen. He is sitting on Oehlens studio rooftop and surrounded by empty beer cans. In a listless shrug, he tells the cameraman that they've been left up there by the neighborhood teenagers and that he wishes to leave it so they can see the mess theyve left. Oehlen is ventriloquizing through the belligerent and maudlin Becker for the docufiction The Painter (2022).
Randy Wray: Travelogue
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWrays ability to avoid semblance and reduction prioritizes specific but undisclosed sources, creating distinct shapes that defer recognition. Hovering in the protean spaces that can simultaneously suggest the interiors of bodies, bones, plants, and tools, Wrays practice stays in the apeiron, presiding over the final moment where forms resist determination and luxuriating in the mutable recognition of shadows.
Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightDanica Lundys exhibit Three Hole Punch potentially offers an alternative response to a post-humanist painting practice through an intentional multivalent painting.
Raymond Saunders
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightRaymond Saunderss current solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps presents a series of gripping assemblages, hung on the walls like excavated fragments. The individual configurations might be referred to as slabs, panels, boards, or slates. However, thinking of the works instead as decks of culture or rafts of visuality may lend us a better lens for interpreting the work.
Mike Shultis: Animal Crackers
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightYou feel the parallels between the aesthetic endgame of painting and American decline itself when you walk into Mike Shultiss Animal Crackers at ASHES/ASHES.
Philip Taaffe
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIn Philip Taaffes exhibition currently on view at Luhring Augustine, the artist explores the transcendent possibilities of symmetry and visual density. Through a series of prismatic mandalas, Taaffes mixed media works on panel set up painting as a form of New Materialist meditation, a relational way of seeing the world that challenges anthropocentrism and probes the ethics of our engagement with non-human kin.
In Conversation
Alexander Galloway with Andrew Woolbright
Protocol is about many things, but maybe most directly about the history of control and the shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. Can you explain what led you to want to write the book? And those historical differences, which I think are incredibly important?
In Conversation
Miguel Abreu with Andrew Woolbright
How did the show The Poet-Engineers come about? When I think of the Lower East Side, and I think about its difference and the texture of it, I think about Miguel Abreu Gallery, and I think about that show, in particular. Its a show that still stays with me and I still consider and think about. And I think part of the reason is it really articulated a philosophy or it believed in an exhibition that was a way forward, or an examination of the present, or a series of possibilities. And I think that that oftentimes gets lost in things. So I just, I'm happy to be sitting down with you and wanted to know, how did this show come about? What I think is the perfect show.
The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe material conditions of being an artist in New York have a direct impact on the aesthetics and considerations taken in the studio and within an artists practice. While the return of the influence of Arte Povera and the prominence of post-studio practices can both can be attributed to ideological and conceptual decisions or to new structures of feeling in Raymond Williamss terms, they can also be translated and defined through the prices of lumber, rising studio costs, and the commuting culture created through the gig economy.