installation view at BWAC Gallery
"Snowball Sale" and "Hudson and Spring" mentioned in review by R.C. Baker in the Village Voice:
"Jean Foos brings a vibrant formal wit to her slathered matrices of paint. Hudson and Spring (1995) was perhaps titled for the street intersection in Manhattan, but the mossy flagstone pattern overlaid with a sinuous net of color-shifting strokes conjures the primeval geometries of nature, before humanity segmented the island into a paved grid. Spheres reminiscent of buckyballs seem to hover within a red web in Foos’s gorgeous, octagon-shaped canvas Snowball Sale (1991). The title made at least this viewer laugh, as he recalled a piece by David Hammons performed near Cooper Union, in 1983, in which the brilliant conceptual artist sold snowballs to passersby from a red-striped blanket stretched out on the sidewalk.
Even if the viewer is wrong about that antecedent, the enthralling visions arising from Hammons’s aesthetic jujitsu helped define the most trenchant cultural currents of those years. New York City was in thrall to the spectacle of vulgar consumption practiced by voracious real estate speculators and hedge fund manipulators. At the national level, President Ronald Reagan saw government not as a tool that could solve society’s problems but as a cudgel with which to further afflict the afflicted, including those affected by a mysterious illness some were calling “the gay plague.”
This official neglect took a high toll on the community of artists...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/28/everything-old-school-is-new-again/
“Everything Old School Is New Again: An exhibition of paintings from 1985 to 1995 reminds us of what we’re missing” (on the “Painting to Survive” show)
"Jean Foos brings a vibrant formal wit to her slathered matrices of paint. Hudson and Spring (1995) was perhaps titled for the street intersection in Manhattan, but the mossy flagstone pattern overlaid with a sinuous net of color-shifting strokes conjures the primeval geometries of nature, before humanity segmented the island into a paved grid. Spheres reminiscent of buckyballs seem to hover within a red web in Foos’s gorgeous, octagon-shaped canvas Snowball Sale (1991). The title made at least this viewer laugh, as he recalled a piece by David Hammons performed near Cooper Union, in 1983, in which the brilliant conceptual artist sold snowballs to passersby from a red-striped blanket stretched out on the sidewalk.
Even if the viewer is wrong about that antecedent, the enthralling visions arising from Hammons’s aesthetic jujitsu helped define the most trenchant cultural currents of those years. New York City was in thrall to the spectacle of vulgar consumption practiced by voracious real estate speculators and hedge fund manipulators. At the national level, President Ronald Reagan saw government not as a tool that could solve society’s problems but as a cudgel with which to further afflict the afflicted, including those affected by a mysterious illness some were calling “the gay plague.”
This official neglect took a high toll on the community of artists...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/28/everything-old-school-is-new-again/
“Everything Old School Is New Again: An exhibition of paintings from 1985 to 1995 reminds us of what we’re missing” (on the “Painting to Survive” show)