Sweet Sixteen: Celebrating 16 years of Capitain Petzel

Bleckner’s paintings are honest, to a fault about their condition, which is the condition of painting without trust. This can be extremely moving, the surfaces seemed punished into songfulness. The best of them could make you weep, without knowing quite why.

– Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic

Charline von Heyl claims to want to make newness with newness since she can't enter the memory of the brush - which, like water, is shamanic and full of energy. The tension she conjures up requires so much attention and spontaneity that she would not be able to follow a simple method or apply readymade recipes. In any case, she announces this intention which isn't devoid of courage or grandeur. She will pursue the difficult route of tackling a new history every day.

 

– Franck Gautherot, Director of Le Consortium Museum, Dijon

Each drawing is a would-be oil painting, for I never repeat any drawing as an oil painting, they are autonomous. My drawings have more freedom and more mobility in them than the oil paintings because I find a sheet of paper that has to rest on something hard easier to position, be it on my knees, on my belly in bed, on the table, on the floor, on the chair, and I myself can take up all sorts of positions in front of it, which cannot be done at all with a mounted canvas, or only with difficulty. The drawing is closest to the idea. 

 

– Maria Lassnig

When I first tried painting the ocean in the early 1990s [...] it was quite difficult to do even though I was at the beach in Amagansett, NY, looking at the ocean every day. So I turned to the American painter Winslow Homer to learn from. This dog and ocean series was based on him.

 

– Sean Landers

Malcolm Morley's blues are extraordinary. Card-table flat and infinite, they collapse all sense of proximity. At once remote and wild with their gnarly collisions of space and time, Morley's paintings induce a sublime kind of nausea.

 

– Dana Schutz 

It’s a very strange feeling to move through a city. You have all these experiences at once. It’s not one thing or the other. It’s flickering back and forth. And I think this happens in all cities.

 

– Sarah Morris

More recently, I started thinking about shape. I’ve never read a book on shape. I’ve read books on gesture; I’ve read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I’ve never read a book on what a shape is. I like shapes. So I was making all of these round ones. And then I thought, “I guess they’re people.”

 

– Amy Sillman

Owens resists monolithic thinking, and for over a decade her work has remained notably diffuse, evoking subjects ranging from those innate to painting such as the formal operations of perspectival space, to more general phenomena such as storytelling and the cyclical patterning of nature. The only predictable element in Owen’s practice is the medium of painting itself, which in her expert hands remains seemingly immune from repeated threats of demise, or, worse, irrelevancy.

 

– Gloria Sutton, Art Historian