THE HUFFINGTON POST
Women Artists Sweep Best of 2010 NYC Arts
Best Gallery One-Person Show: Deborah Kass at Paul Kasmin Gallery ,i>MORE Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times. Reprising the moods and painterly modus operandi she established for her 2007
Feel Good exhibition, Deborah Kass again banners lyrics across abstract iconography recalling the Art of Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Bruce Nauman….
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TIME OUT NEW YORK
Deborah Kass, "More Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times"OCTOBER 21, 2010
Sequentially using up her aesthetic nine lives, Deborah Kass has been, within this critic's memory, an abstract painter, a feminist appropriation artist and a pointedly Jewish Warhol impersonator. Some of her new canvases add Broadway belter to her resume. The diptych Frank's Dilemma mashes up a multicolor concentric-square double image...
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ART INFO
Singing on the Edge of Extinction: A Q&A With Painter Deborah Kass
NEW YORK— "MORE Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times," Deborah Kass's current show at Paul Kasmin, may contain some of the most ebullient art now on view anywhere in New York. Expanding on a project she first showed at the gallery in 2007, Kass plucks the signature works and styles of some of the 20th century's most iconic male...
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ART IN AMERICA
Deborah Kass: Back to Broadway
Andy Warhol never painted the great female Broadway belters Ethel Merman, Sophie Tucker or Barbra Streisand. While making paintings of almost every female superstar of his era, Warhol curiously avoided making any work based on la Streisand or Merman. The New York painter Deborah Kass became well known in the 1990's for a series called...
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CULTURE CATCH
Parallel Lines - Deborah Kass
There is a great Roy Lichtenstein painting from the 1960s called "Image Duplicator" that shows a comic book mad scientist with a thought bubble that reads, "What do you know about my Image Duplicator!" Whether this mythical machine ever existed outside the realm of Lichtenstein's imagination is besides the point -- dozens of artist from the '60s...
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FLAVORWIRE
Deborah Kass: The Painted Word
Mixing art, language, music, and politics with a sense of irony, artist Deborah Kass makes lively pop paintings that mash-up the times of her life with the spirit of the moment. Appropriating recognizable painting styles from post-war art giants Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly and American Songbook lyrics from...
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ARTNET
KASSASSTROPHIES
By 6:10 p.m. of the 6 o’clock opening of Deb Kass’ new word scrabble paintings at Paul Kasmin, the gallery had decided to remove a Morris Louis stripe painting and a light pastel Ken Noland stripe painting downstairs to a private viewing room and install Kass’ flourescent light tribute to Bruce Nauman in a room of its own...
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SAATCHI ONLINE
Doug McClemont’s Top 10 Shows in New York: October 2010
Painter Kass, following her 20+ year dialogue with the work of Warhol, made a bold move to text-based appropriations with “Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times.” In this second exhibition of new works from the series, snippets of show-tune lyrics, such as “Being Alive” “Day After Day After Day After Day,” “Daddy, I Would Love to Dance,”...
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BROOKLYN RAIL
Deborah Kass with Terry R. Myers
Lecturer, critic, and independent curator Terry R. Myers recently spoke with artist Deborah Kass, withe forthcoming exhibition "MORE feel good paintings for feel bad times" will show at Paul Kasmin Gallery September 23- October 30, 2010, about her life and work.
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BOMB MAGAZINE
Deborah Kass
In 1992, I first saw pictures of multiple heads of Barbara Streisand in a grid that pirated Andy Warhol's self-portraits outrageously. What was I to make of them? They were by a Deborah Kass, a name new to me. I could have walked away but I didn't. Why would a younger artist appropriate the master appropriator? It had to be an homage. But why Streisand?
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ART IN AMERICA
Deborah Kass at Paul Kasmin Gallery
In Deborah Kass's celebrated "Warhol Project" (1999-2001), she transposed the star-struck gaze of Warhol portraits--the product of a gay man who seemed to have adorned and identified with famous women--through the lense of a feminist, lesbian, Jewish eye, locating Barbra Streisand's "transgendered" Yentl in Warhol's gun-toting Elvis and recasting Blue Liz and Blue Deb (2000)...
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ARTNEWS
Reviews: New York
Deborah Kass came to prominence in the 1990s with Warhol-style works that deal pointedly with her identity as a Jewish lesbian. In this show Warhol was not entirely out of the picture, but he shared space with Morris Louis, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, and lyricist composer Stephen Sondheim...
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THE NEW YORK SUN
Poles of the Feminist Spectrum
Two exhibitions of paintings by women who work with words represent opposite poles of approach to facture, and wildly divergent ideas about what makes a painting interesting to look at. For all their differences, however, each demonstrates a feminist undertow, and both are distinctly New York. They represent flip sides of our schizophrenic metropolis.
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THE NEW YORKER
Deborah Kass
Kass is a voracious sampler. Instead of trying to cloak her interests in the foggy mantle of "influence," she comes right out and says (in a catalogue interview with John Waters), "I'm trying to feel as entitled as I can to every vocabulary I know and love. Musical, visual, and emotional." A bursting Op art-inspired painting is stencilled with the come-on "Do You Wanna Funk with Me."
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GAY CITY
The Word May Be the Thing
The beginning of the season has brought us two remarkable shows at either end of the 10th Avenue gallery corridor. The shows beg for comparison. Both are by excellent women artists who engage in what is by now a genre - text painting or, put another way, work that includes words and phrases in painting. The two women are working at the intersection of language, symbols, and abstraction.
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TIME OUT NEW YORK
Deborah Kass
Deborah Kass, "Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times." Works created over the past five years incorporate words from American movies, Broadway, Yiddish, and other sources to reexamine what it's like to be a baby boomer painting in the postwar period and today.
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ARTCAL
Deborah Kass
Paul Kasmin and Vincent Fremont are pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Deborah Kass. This is her first major exhibition in the United States in six years and her first in New York in twelve years. In this highly anticipated exhibiton, Kass will show her third body of work dealing with the intersection of the self, popular culture, contemporary art, and art history.
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ART NEWSPAPER
Deborah Kass: Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times
In the commercial galleries, for her first major exhibition in the US in six years, the New York-based artist examines where self, popular culture, contemporary art and art history collide. Kass describes the work as "feel good paintings for feel bad times."
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ARTNET
Another Opening, Another Show
A fetid, humid Friday evening didn't stop hordes of middle-aged admirers from pouring into the non-air-conditioned Paul Kasmin Gallery to view Deborah Kass' triumphant show of "happy" pictures. We spied Marilyn Lerner, Matthew Abbott, Chrysanne Stachacos, Kathe Burckhardt, Laurie Thomas, Lisa Hoke and many other veterans marveling at Deborah steamrolling back into splendor.
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ARTNEWS
'The Eighth Square'
There was no faulting the seriousness or significance of this investigation of gender bending in the art of our time, although the presentation as a whole left something to be desired - including desire itself. The organizers - independent curator Frank Wagner with the museum's Julia Friedrich and director Kaspar Konig - explored the erosion of conventional sexual categories and cliches through 350 paintings, photos, videos, and sculptures by 80 international artists.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
That Sanitation Truck Parked on the Pier? It's Part of the Show
The Armory Show, which opens today on Pier 94, began life more than a dozen years ago as a funky, bed-bath-and-beyond affair in the guest rooms of a downtown hotel. Paintings were propped on pillows, drawings Scotch-taped to walls. One artist made love to a motorcycle; another took a three-day shower. The whole thing was kids playing Art Fair. If some of them took home some cash, that was nice butn ot really the point.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Possessed: A Place to Park the Imagination
Where does decoration leave off and art begin? Where does homage stop and aping start? When does irreverence turn into criticism? While these are good questions for any young artist, they are not necessarily ones that the artist Deborah Kass and the decorator William Diamond asked each other when they met in 1970 on the first day of art school at Carnegie Mellon.
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ART + AUCTION
Go Solo
One way to attract collectors is to focus on a single artist. Thus, at the Armory Show, Paul Kasmin features new work by Deborah Kass, who became known some 15 years ago for her clever riffs on Warhol...
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ARTNET
A Visit with Deb and Pattie
The January thaw brought us out to Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and the adjoining studios of Deborah Kass and Patricia Cronin. Having a writer's prejudice against the use of text in painting, we were initially taken aback by Kass' new body of work. But this foremost interpreter of Warhol through a womanly lens can be very persuasive.
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Leisure & Arts
In my bleaker moments, I sometimes think that art schools should be abolished and making art declared illegal, so that it would cease to be a career choice, like dentistry, and return to being a passion. There are far too many artists and not enough even moderately talented ones, despite the exponential increase in their numbers since the 1960s. It doesn't matter how broad the base of the pyramid is; only a handful of really first rate artists occupy the tiny zone at the top, as they have through the long history of art.
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ARTNEWS
Peer Factor
When it comes to posing for portraits, artists are far more "guarded and controlling" than the average sitter and "stingy in terms of what they're willing to give," according to David Robins, who in 1986 immortalized 18 rising art stars, among them Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer, in "Talent," a series of black-and-white head shots.
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TIME OUT NEW YORK
Amuse Me
For most of us, the pursed red lips in Elizabeth Peyton's jewellike portrait of Sid Vicious probably hold more appeal than the kisser on William Wegman's weimaraner, but who are we to quibble with an artist's inspiration? The works in "The Muse" at Leslie Tonkonow depict everything from mangled dolls (Hans Bellmer's nightmarish photos) to loving wives (Richard Diebenkorn's reverent sketch).
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ARTNEWS
To Thine Own Selves Be True
For her part, painter Deborah Kass is careful to distinguish performing personas from art that plays with what she terms "the idea of being more than one thing at a time." Last year Kass organized a sweeping survey of contemporary self-portraiture in a group exhibition at Momenta Art, a nonprofit gallery in Brooklyn.
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THE BOSTON GLOBE
Something Borrowed
We think of artists as gifted: They have something special, something most of us don't have. Yet we don't think of a particularly skilled auto mechanic as having a gift, or a lawyer, or even a world leader. What do we mean by gifted, and what is it about artists that causes us to see them as perhaps more blessed than the rest of us? It's partly that they do what they do for love first, and money second.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Looking at Those Images, Again and Again
When it comes to ambitious, attention-getting names, it will be hard to beat "Queer Visualities: Reframing Sexuality in a Post-Warhol World," the title of a lively, diverse and often beguiling exhibition at the Stony Brook University Art Gallery. The project coincides with an international conference, "Queer Visualities," sponsored by the university earlier this month.
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ART NEWSPAPER
"Enough about me"
Enough About Me is a famous vaudeville punch line about narcissism and now the title of an amusing and instructive exhibition (until 26 May) at momenta art organised by Deborah Kass on the theme of personal identity as masquerade, display and performative game.
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ARTFORUM
A Warholian Trifecta
We seem to be living in, among other things, Andy's afterlife. Three Warholian enterprises last year (well, four, if you include the brouhaha surrounding the Fred Hughes memorial and estate sale) have variously reframed the work he made, the life he led, and the one he's left us with: (a) Deborah Kass (Blaffer Gallery, Houston, TX).
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Deborah Kass' The Warhol Project
Deborah Kass' The Warhol Project, comprised of photo-based paintings and silkscreens at the Blaffer Gallery, is as brash as Stautberg's photographs are subtle. She began the project in 1992, believing, curator Michael Plante writes in the exhibition catalog, that "she could manipulate (Andy) Warhol's pictorial language to speak about herself and her own cultural priorities."
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THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Deborah Kass Packs Along Personal Politics as She Ventures Into Andy Warhol Territory
Deborah Kass is a moderately well-recognized, New York-based artist in her late 40s. If casual viewers fail to notice the resemblance between her work and Andy Warhol's, she reminds them by calling her exhibition "Deborah Kass: The Warhol Project." Exhibited at UC Santa Barbara's University Art Museum, a dozen large works either insert Kass' face into Warhol's self-portraits or substitute her choice of celebrity for his.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Opening Night2