Over 2,000 of you voted and selected Carlos Daniel Donjuan as New American Paintings Reader’s Choice Artist of 2013. Congratulations Carlos!

As this year’s winner, Donjuan will receive $500 in cash from New American Paintings and $1000 in gift certificates to our annual prize sponsor Dick Blick Art Materials.

After the jump learn more about the winner!

You have seen Annie Lapin's (NAP #91) work in our magazine, and on our blog. See her work, in the flesh, at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles. Her exhibition, Various Peep Shows, is one of our Must-See shows for the month of January!

Check out this video we produced about her a couple of years ago with Future Shipwreck. And, below the jump, read more about her current exhibition.

Generosity is rarely immediately questioned when viewing an exhibition for the first time. It is often a given in the work, in many ways expected, though it is not to be underestimated. In his current exhibition on view at Shane Campbell, Parallel Processing, local painter Paul Cowan stages a void – a scarceness of information and material that favors a sparse collection of work, mainly a flush series of monochromes with minimal demarcations. In a very pop delineation of surface reflection, the canvases represent windows. They do not look within, or reflect anything other than their own emphatic presence. - Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Contributor

Installation view, BCEAUSE THE SKY IS BULE, 2013. Chroma-key blue paint on canvas. 78h x 41w in each.

I was not familiar with the term “hobby lantern” prior to seeing Robert Yoder’s (NAP #85) new paintings.  It turns out to be a phenomenon of atmospheric, apparition-like lights that appear in boggy conditions, leading travelers astray from the safest path, also known as a will-o’-the-wisp. Appearing in titles of works featured in Dark Entries at Seattle’s Platform Gallery this month, the hobby lantern is a fitting keystone for paintings rich in both the thick, muddiness of their surfaces and the emotional sensibilities that flare beneath. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

Robert Yoder | TEENAGE DONNA (HOBBY LANTERN 1), 2013, oil and acrylic on cotton bandana. 18 x 17.5 inches. Image courtesy of Platform Gallery.

I looked a lot of art while hunkering down to escape the subarctic temperatures blasting through Boston and much of the rest of the country. My monthly review of more than four hundred gallery shows yielded close to one hundred must-see painting shows, three-dozen of which involve New American Paintings’ alumni.

Among the NAP exhibitions are Radcliffe Bailey at Jack Shianman Gallery in New York City (the mid-career, Atlanta-based artist’s work was the focus of a stellar museum exhibition that traveled for much of 2011 and 2012); John Sparagana at Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago,; Astrid Bowlby at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia; and in Los Angeles, Annie Lapin (2010 NAP Artist of the Year) and Matthew Penkala, at Honor Fraser and Western Project, respectively.

John Sparagana. Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey.

There are two noteworthy gallery shows of artists who made their reputations in the earlier part of the 20^th-Century: works by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton are on display at Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta, and Mr. Push/Pull, Hans Hoffman, whose students included a number of prominent second generation Abstract Expressionists, is on view at Ameringer|McEnery|Yohe in New York City. A number of emerging painters look particularly good this month, including: Alexandra Grant at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin; Zoe Nelson at Western Exhibitions in Chicago; Laeh Glenn at Altman Siegel in San Francisco; and in New York, Anke Weyer at Canada, Davina Semo at Marlborough Chelsea, and Kour Pour at Untitled.

If abstraction is not your thing, there are plenty of shows of artists working with images, some in a more traditional mode. In Chicago, eighty-something Jane Freilicher will have a one-woman show at Chicago’s Valerie Carberry Gallery. Maine-based painter Gideon Bok has a soon-to-close solo show of paintings depicting the interior of his studio at Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, Texas. In New York, be sure to catch Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore, Steven Assael at Forum Gallery, and Robert Bechtle at Gladstone Gallery.

After the jump, you'll find the entire must-see list for January. Enjoy. - Steven Zevitas, Publisher

Of the 240 artists featured in New American Paintings in 2013, twelve (two from each issue) were distinguished as being Noteworthy. And this is where it gets fun....now it is your opportunity to turn 12 artists into 1. Below, you will find 2013’s twelve Noteworthy artists listed, along with an image and brief commentary. One of these 12 artists will be named the New American Paintings Artist of the Year! In addition to being featured again in our 2014 June/July issue, the winner of the Reader’s Choice Annual Prize will receive a cash prize of $500 and a $1,000 Blick Art Materials gift certificate sponsored by:

Learn more about each artist after the jump!

Cast your vote by Wednesday, January 15th (Midnight EST). The winner of the Reader’s Choice poll will be announced on Friday, January 24th. 

A few months ago, I saw painter Francesca Bifulco’s work at Bergamot Station’s Jna Gallery in Santa Monica.  Her “crowd series” moved and impressed me with their sheer size, the density and details of the crowds depicted, the hard-lined graphics, and the oscillating feeling between oppressivity and sensitivity that she creates. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Francesca Bifulco | In the Crowd #4, 130” x 83”, Acrylic on canvas, Paestum, Italy, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

How do we prescribe shape to flatness? For the earth, it was a ship. For painting, it was once the illusion of space opening up though the canvas into other worlds, other imaginaries. The preoccupation of rendering the dimensional out of the un-dimensional is one that the conception of pre-modern painting has struggled with from the start. This revolt, against flatness, is more deeply a fascination that centuries of artists and thinkers have since worked to undo. The rejection of depth has historically been the revolutionary voice in overthrowing “truths” in art – the denial of space representing the ultimate mutiny against illusionistic and pictorial ideologies, “changing the system against a utopian promise.” The full potentials of this upheaval are realized in a current exhibition of Paul Sietsema’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

In a stunning survey of paintings, drawings, and films, Sietsema recreates the photographic vernacular in its most spectacular trompe l’oeil representations; never capturing the thing itself, but instead the lens that looks onto the tactile object. Sietsema’s images often reference his own process, imitating the material inherent within the making itself – the folds, wrinkles, and markings of wear on a piece of paper painstakingly rendered on the surface of an ink drawing, the sun stained quality of a Technicolor photograph replicated in washes of de-saturated hues. The stamp of time that occupies Sietsema’s historical, and often archival, encyclopedic subjects is reworked, recontextualized, and eradicated from history – replaced instead by a commonly constructed memory of romantic subjects – sailboats at sea, pages torn out of books, postmarked parcels and traces of transcontinental travel, the paint brush on the canvas itself – a fragile texture that floats on its viewers own image of nostalgia, while opposing any facile or comfortable recognition. Like a film that erases itself as it plays, Sietsema locates a moment between the vanished and the never present – a revolutionary relationship to flatness that can only be imagined as emulating the very first moment the ship fell off the horizon. –Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Contributor

Paul Sietsema | Folded Corner, 2012. © Paul Sietsema. Photo: Ron Amstutz, courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Ranging from the charming to the absurd, the work of Antonio Berni has been ubiquitous in Argentina since the 1930s, when he was a young artist advocating for political change. Little-known in the United States today, his works are a staple in many of Argentina’s major institutions, forming the core of permanent collections like the Latin American Museum of Buenos Aires (MALBA) and the National Museum of Fine Arts. With an oeuvre that spans several decades of the twentieth century (Berni was prolific until his death in 1981), the diversity of his styles is astounding. While visiting Buenos Aires recently, I encountered small Chirico-style surrealist panels, expressive mural-sized scenes similar to those of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and—most curiously—an enormous papier-mâché sculpture of an alligator-monster with a woman’s legs emerging from its mouth.  

Antonio Berni | La pesadilla de Ramona (The nightmare of Ramona), 1964, Mixed media, approx. 3 x 2 x 10 feet, MALBA, Buenos Aires.

The unwavering march of progress, of societal convenience and betterment with a blind eye to consequences — what consequences? Damn the consequences! But there is always a response, a reaction to action, as Maria Hansen depicts in tight grouping of watercolors at Pump Project on Austin's east side. Within her flickering, vignette-like compositions, we find that some of these Mutations of Progress develop into favorable conclusions on their own, when life is left to run wild. — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Maria Hansen | Pripyat, 2013, ink and watercolor on paper, 29 x 37” framed. Image courtesy the artist and Pump Project, Austin.