The New Yorker | Review: Julia Dault

The Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist has won acclaim for her laborious but elegant sculptures made from sheets of Formica and Plexiglas, which she fashions on site without nails or glue. There’s one here, but it’s Dault’s paintings that steal the show, treading the line between programmatic and expressionistic. Patterned black-and-white abstractions repeat motifs of squiggles or angles, with occasional slippages and imperfections; others make use of sgraffito, with bright color seeping through scratched-away top coats of black. The unapologetic beauty of Dault’s work trivializes the pretensions of the so-called zombie formalists, giving painting for painting’s sake a good name.