A 1991 painting from the show called “Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings,” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in London. (Click on the image to enlarge it.) I totally reject the vaporous cliche of the “great painter” who has a preternatural grasp of the canvas and how to lay color down on it. I especially reject the idea that such a cliche might have much to do with art. And yet, confronted with these late paintings by Mitchell, I found myself thinking of her as a great painter with a preternatural grasp of the canvas and how to lay color down on it, and as making good art in the process. (This picture was made the year before Mitchell’s death, when she was battling cancer.)

For a full visual archive of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

February 20, 2012 08:33pm

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Tom Friedman’s new sculpture of a peeing man, alongside its source image. The piece is eight feet tall and made out of stainless steel, but it was cast from a prototype that was assembled from aluminum turkey-roasting pans. It’s a landmark: probably the only self-portrait of an artist in the act of urination, and certainly the only one made from turkey-roasting pans. You can read more about it, and the new solo show it is in at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, in my little profile of Friedman in the last Newsweek.

For a full visual archive of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

February 19, 2012 07:49am

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The “Book of Time” was completed in 1963 by Brazilian pioneer Lygia Pape, and is now in a small survey show called “Magnetized Space” at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The piece includes 365 different geometric abstractions – which don’t turn out to be all that abstract, given how well they stand for the variety and repetition of our passing days.

February 18, 2012 08:14am

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Zoe Strauss shot this photo in 2001 and it is now in her solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Strauss, an art activist and self-trained artist, does classic American street photography, with a difference: Before being shown in art galleries, her pictures were mounted in annual shows in an abandoned space under I-95 in South Philadelphia, where they were on sale for five dollars. Strauss goes some way toward bridging the troubling gap that's always existed between elite art photographers and their humble subjects.

February 16, 2012 03:50am

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