"A couple of small artist-run galleries are opening, too — Cate Holt’s Springs Projects in DUMBO, and JJ MURPHY GALLERY on the Lower East Side. JJ maintains @dagcentral, a beloved Instagram art review project, and he tells me that the gallery will open on Stanton Street in early February."  —  Two Coats of Paint 


Mario Naves on Andrew Shea's "Grocery Slips" in The New York Sun (October 30, 2025):


Andrew Shea, a Painter Who Has Made a Name for Himself as an Art Critic, Gets His First New York City Exhibition



‘Andrew Shea: Grocery Slips’

JJ Murphy Gallery
Until November 15


Andrew Shea’s paintings, the subject of an exhibition at J.J. Murphy Gallery, are quiet in their ambition and deceivingly modest in scope. The show’s title, “Grocery Slips,” couldn’t be more unostentatious, connoting, as it does, a vestige of everyday life that most of us can hardly be bothered with. The subjects of the canvases are similarly commonplace: the morning’s first cup of coffee, an afternoon siesta, one’s belongings refracted in a mirror, and, well, what is it that’s happening in the painting titled “9 A.M.”?


A figure at her morning toilette, perhaps; a woman huddling in a dense robe, maybe. The scene is energized with a flurry of chromatic grays, and situated within an expanse of milky green. Selective dabs of ochre, blue, and red, along with gray, black, and ivory, dance toward the left of the composition, suggesting objects in the distance. How important is it that the viewer pin down the specifics of an image? Not much: It is enough that Mr. Shea has given permanence to a moment otherwise lost in the passage of time.


“Grocery Slips” is the first New York City exhibition of a painter who has made a name for himself as an art critic, having written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and the Brooklyn Rail. Mr. Shea is a rarity in a field renowned for its lumpish and often obscurantist jargon. His prose is supple, his eye nuanced, and his temperament appreciative — though he is capable of being pointed when the subject warrants skepticism. The German painter Gerhard Richter, Mr. Shea wrote in a memorable apercu, “has the whimsicality of an accountant.”


How well does the wordsmith fare as a painthandler? The tool most in evidence is among the least gainly: a palette knife. Imagine rendering an image in a manner not unlike spreading cream cheese on a bagel: detail and finesse are sacrificed for blunt shapes and a generous physicality. As a result, Mr. Shea’s paintings are endowed with a lush and somewhat counterintuitive monumentality. The surfaces are sumptuous to behold.


Mr. Shea claims as inspirations the poets William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler, temperaments who sought to underscore (pace Schuyler) “a nothing day full of wild beauty.” A similar elevation of the ordinary occurs in the intimisme of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. The former divined within the accumulative process of layering oils an underlying tenderness beneath the prosaic; the latter put brush to canvas with a terse obdurance and sneaking psychological portent. Mr. Shea is in direct correspondence with these precedents, and acquits himself handsomely in the process.


By virtue of its scale, the largish “Morning Coffee” (2025) should count as the show-stopper, and, truth to tell, its bravura run of warm, unnameable colors has much to recommend to it. But Mr. Shea has a gift with small formats, for condensed areas of real estate that prompt an exacting focus on suggestion. The cool grays that dominate “Wickenden Breakfast” and the tawny range of hues seen in “Drawing Session (A+B)” (2024) seem to expand beyond the borders of the canvases, endowing their miniaturist mises en scène with both gravity and grace.


For those who treasure art for how it can elaborate on the vagaries of everyday experience, Mr. Shea’s fetching array of “residual gestures” should not be missed.



Jonathan Agin on Andrew  Shea's "Grocery Slips" in Two Coats of  Paint  (October 31, 2025)


https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2025/10/andrew-sheas-domestic-enchantment.html



Judith Simonian podcast interview with Brainard Carey on Yale Radio (June 25, 2025):


https://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/judith-simonian/



Amanda Church on Judith Simonian's exhibition "The Human Element, Huddled and Still" in Whitehot Magazine (June 9, 2025):


https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/simonian-human-element-huddled-still/7064



Anna Shukeylo on Judith Simonian's exhibition "The Human Element, Huddled and Still" in Art Spiel (June 9, 2025):


https://artspiel.org/judith-simonian-the-human-element-huddled-and-still/

 


Christopher Atamian on Judith Simonian's exhibition "The Human Element, Huddled and Still" in Art Speak—EVN Report (June 9, 2025):


https://evnreport.com/columns/the-vision-of-judith-simonian/



Lucas Moran on Dan Schein's exhibition "Dan Paintings" in Two Coats of Paint (April 26,2025):


https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2025/04/dan-scheins-muddy-sublime.html



Nora Sturges Interview in The Hopkins Review (December 6, 2024)


https://hopkinsreview.com/features/nora-sturges-in-conversation



James Kalm Rough Cut YouTube video on Nora Sturges's solo show "Voices in the Dark" (November 23, 2024)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbYaz0FjBtA&t=76s



Roberta Smith on Mala Iqbal's "The Edge of an Encounter"


"Mala Iqbal’s show, in its last day at JJ Murphy (53 Stanton, LES) presents paintings in which the political, the painterly and the luminous collaborate, brought in alliance by a confident touch. Scenes of protest, homelessness and possibly violence are on hand. Debts to Picasso, Beckmann and Kitchener are evident, as is a contemporary cohort that includes Eisenman, Linhares, Madani, others. Starting out as talented creator of watercolor landscapes, Iqbal has proceeded to her current level over the past 15 years or so. It has taken her a while, which is unsurprising. Painting takes time." — Roberta Smith, November 9, 2024, Instagram



Hyperallergic lists Mala Iqbal’s Solo Exhibition “The Edge of an Encounter” as One of Six Art Shows to see in New York Right Now (October 15, 2024)


Mala Iqbal: The Edge of an Encounter

JJ Murphy Gallery, 53 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through November 9


“Intractable wars and demonic weapons, entire families wiped out in one-minute airstrikes, children starved to death, elderly people crushed under the boots of soldiers, millions turned into helpless refugees, a defeated middle class rapidly sinking into poverty, unintelligent leaders, cowardly intellectuals, feckless artists, fake allies, thieves and liars at every corner, empires crashing into the dust, wolves baring their teeth, billionaires foaming at the mouth, people hiding inside their phones, where on Instagram a heart-wrenching photo of a mournful mother who lost everything is followed by an ad for a robot vacuum cleaner. On the sidelines of this mayhem that we’re living through are honest witnesses like Mala Iqbal, whose outstanding suite of paintings for this exhibition will leave you with a strange, unfathomable sense of hope.” —Hakim Bishara


https://hyperallergic.com/955543/six-new-york-city-art-shows-to-octobe/



Hyperallergic lists Charles Yuen's Solo Exhibition "Frequency Surfing" as One of the 10 Art Shows to see in New York  Right Now (September 10, 2024)


10 Art Shows to See in New York Right Now

Artists including Leon Golub, Charles Yuen, Naudline Pierre, and Manny Vega are kicking off the fall art season with must-see shows.


Charles Yuen: Frequency Surfing

JJ Murphy Gallery, 53 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 5


“This newish gallery is the site of a solo exhibition by one of the original members of the influential Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, Charles Yuen. His brash, textured canvas works have a dreamlike quality that distills seemingly simple compositions into layered scenes that occupy your imagination. “Shoulder Assist” (2023) and “This Again” (2023) are good examples of his language cutting to the core of what almost feels like various artistic anxieties. In the former, a figure sits atop another’s shoulders as they stare at a forest of ladders and dots that form the roots of a gesturally outlined forest, and in the other, a figure catches fire while their companion appears helpless to do much of anything with its ladder arms. Paint often seems to be in flux on his surfaces and the artist refuses purity in favor of a sometimes muddy line that produces a sense of speed, as if the artist was jotting something down before the idea slipped away.” —HV


https://hyperallergic.com/949302/10-art-shows-to-see-in-new-york-september-2024/



Jonathan Stevenson on Farrell's Brickhouse's exhibition "Looking Back at Tomorrow" in Two Coats of Paint (April 23, 2024):


https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2024/04/farrell-brickhouse-the-beat-goes-on.html



Riad Miah on Farrell's Brickhouse's exhibition "Looking Back at Tomorrow" in Art Spiel (April 26, 2024):


https://artspiel.org/farrell-brickhouse-looking-back-at-tomorrow-at-jj-murphy-gallery/



Alice Zinnes on Farrell Brickhouse's exhibition"Looking Back at Tomorrow" in Entropvisions (April 25, 2024):


https://www.alicezinnes.com/entropvisions--blog-/view/6400011/0/8306820



Barbara MacAdam on "An Extended Family of Painters," Brooklyn Rail (May, 2024):


“As an off-stage adjunct to the [Peter] Freeman exhibition, there is the enlightening show An Extended Family of Painters: Hermine Ford, Robert Moskowitz, Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and Daniel Brustlein, at JJ Murphy Gallery on Stanton Street. The Murphy show serves as a fascinating counterpoint to the one at Freeman’s, highlighting the work of Moskowitz’s wife Hermine Ford, and Ford’s father, the influential abstract painter Jack Tworkov, who was a close friend of Moskowitz’s. Together, this family provides a stunning overview of the range of painting being made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”


https://brooklynrail.org/2024/05/artseen/Robert-Moskowitz-Paintings-and-Drawings-from-Four-Decades



David Ebony lists David Hornung’s inaugural exhibition as one of the 10 best shows of Winter 2024:


https://snapeditions.com/2024/02/29/david-ebonys-top-10-winter-2024/?doing_wp_cron=1709555123.4965090751647949218750



Natasha Sweeten’s review of the gallery's inaugural exhibition of David Hornung: New Work" in Two Coats of Paint (Feb. 24, 2024):


https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2024/02/david-hornungs-whispered-secrets.html