Cool Hunting

David Reed
It's either the eye-pop effect of his palette or the graffiti tag sensibility of the brushstrokes that endear David Reed's new paintings to me. They just seem familiar. In what can feel like an austere and exclusive world of high culture and Chelsea art openings, his solo show opened with a mix of 20-something hipsters and beret-topped collectors. So it seemed like Reed achieved...

Julie Heffernan
New York City-based painter Julie Heffernan's oils look like they were painted by 17th-century Flemish masters in Antwerp. But no, this Peoria, Illinois-born woman is a contemporary artist that can make the rest of us born in the 20th century proud. Her large-scale compositions use the classical style to touch on psychology, gender, motherhood and class. (Click image for detail.) Raised in Northern California,...

Jason Young: New Works
Jason Young, the New York-based artist who makes "high-tech minimal 'trompe-l’oeuil'" paintings, has a show opening this Thursday, 15 March 2007, at NYC's Cristinerose gallery. The exhibition features recent works that layer resin and other materials over honeycomb alloy, a material used in the construction of airplanes, for an effect that adds surprising dimension. (To see his intensive process, watch this recent CH video.)...

Tamara Kostianovsky: Actus Reus
"Actus Reus" is the debut solo exhibition of Tamara Kostianovsky, an Israeli artist raised in Argentina and currently living in Brooklyn. The show consists of life-sized animal carcasses painstakingly reconstructed using second-hand clothing, which are all former pieces from the artist's actual wardrobe. The patchwork constructions adopt a remarkably grotesque quality, hanging from meat hooks in an antiseptic gallery space. The exhibition's Latin title...

Gary Panter: Pictures from the Psychedelic Swamp: 1972 – 2001
Fans of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, RAW and SLASH magazines and the comic character Jimbo know and love the work of Gary Panter. You probably know it too, having seen his “jagged lines and surreal cartoons” in magazines, on TV and on the internet too. “Pictures from the Psychedelic Swamp: 1972 – 2001” a micro-mini retrospective of thirty years of drawings, sculptures, painting and installations...

Whitney Biennial 2008
This time around we chose to cover the Whitney Biennial with help from the museum's exhibition designer, Mark Steigelman. Last week's video on Olaf Breuning included a glimpse of his Biennial installation at the Park Avenue Armory (an off-site component that's new this year) and this episode is a select survey of the works by the 50-odd artists showing at the Whitney. Mark explains the...