John Baeder’s Stardust Motel (1977), is a crisp, sunlit portrait of American roadside culture at its most iconic. Known for his photorealist paintings of diners, gas stations, and motels, Baeder treats the Stardust not as nostalgia-soaked ruin, but as a proud, functioning emblem of mid-century optimism. The signage is clean, declarative, and bold, the sky impossibly blue —everything rendered with the precision of a memory you’re not quite sure you actually lived. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: John Baeder, Stardust Motel→
This intricately pattern painting, Blue Burst Fan (1979), playfully brings together the traditions of decorative and fine arts. Miriam Shapiro (1923 – 2015) cultivated this approach as a key figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement, drawing on myriad textiles ranging from those related to her Russian Jewish heritage to Japanese Kimonos. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Miriam Schapiro, Blue Burst Fan→
Sweeping abstract flows of paint drench torsos and limbs in Illana Savdie’s Cow (2023), sowing perceptual confusion. The effect on the viewer is placelessness and near-disorientation, which the artist uses to disrupt power dynamics. She allows multiple cultural, contexts and inheritances to simultaneously smash into and balance one another, resulting in entirely new formations. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Cow By Illana Savdie→
Decades after completing his most famous painting — a depiction of a pipe inscribed This is Not a Pipe — Rene Magritte here revisits this iconography with The Shadows (1966). The same masculine- identified object covers ominously behind a tree, inspired by a Surrealist play with arbitrary scale, and what the artist would term the “logic“ of dreams.
