COVID-19
Anne Labovitz has made an art career by mixing together social relations and abstract painterly gestures—successful enough to have landed her the keys to Duluth, Minnesota, and its five international sister cities. So what’s a humanistically minded artist to do during a global viral pandemic? After recovering from her own scary bout with COVID, Labovitz retreated to a newly set-up basement studio and got to work painting, just good old painting, no outside participation necessary. The results, perhaps not unsurprisingly, look just as winning as her public work, brimming with brash color in a variety of marks big, small and all-over. Especially notable are a trio of large square canvases that appear to have been cut straight from a wall of rainbow-hued graffiti, full of confident tags, cloudy sprays, and drippy brushwork. Could there be a more fitting subject for an artist equally concerned with interhuman relationships and non-objective creative expression?
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-29 9:03 AM