Matthew Hansel packed more than a picnic for his trip to the seashore. The knot of exquisitely contorted bodies piled up under the shade of a yellow-and-white umbrella in his painting Balance Fails to Seduce Those Who Find Pleasure in the Fall, 2023, perfectly articulates the various emotional and conceptual facets of “Beach,” a two-venue exhibition featuring the work of eighty-seven artists—executed over the course of two centuries—curated by Danny Moynihan.
Included in this capacious offering is Sara Berman’s canvas Beach Bootie, 2023, a provocatively titled self-portrait in which the artist depicts herself wearing cowboy boots while lying on her back in the sand to soak up some sun. In Katherine Bradford’s painting Beach Fire Circle, 2023, two figures sit by a bonfire—the work’s bright colors and unfussy rendering are reminiscent of Milton Avery. An elongated man in Jonathan Wateridge’s oil-on-canvas Expatria Study No. 10, 2018, floats within a pale-blue picture plane on a blow-up raft. Nearby, a stylized hurly-burly of humanity fishing and fucking drifts asea in William Copley’s Drinking Boat, 1994. And in an acrylic painting concocted by an AI program, Walter Robinson presents a trio of topless and bikini-clad women who look like an eerie rendition of the Three Graces.
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