We’ve already shared a few of our own personal favorites from 2014, and to round out the year, we asked artists themselves to offer up their highlights from the past 12 months in the art world. Their responses were overwhelming (artists love to talk about art! Who knew?), so we’ve split this feature into two installments. Part I follows below — stay tuned for Part II, which includes selections from Zoe Crosher, Karl Haendel, and others.

Diana Al-Hadid

Charles Long at Tanya Bonakdar

“I’ve always been a huge fan of his work — I love his winding and slithering forms and small universes. Nothing is ever fixed, neither the forms nor the materials, everything is between being and not being; between figure, landscape, abstraction; between sloppy and precise. You can see fragments of casting processes which gain further significance as they seem develop into elements of smaller sub-narratives. His drawings-on-photographs of the sky were also beautifully delicate, amoeba-ish echoes of the sculptures.”

Kathy Buttler at Tibor de Nagy

“Her incredibly detailed little ceramic sculptures, with their cracking and dripping glosses, are endlessly engaging things to look at. They’re exquisitely made: sagging, limping, inside-out little things. The forms are funny, smart, sophisticated, and truly innovative. I left feeling energized for days.”

Ridley Howard

Henri Matisse, “The Cut-Outs” at the Museum of Modern Art

“The ingredients are so simple and well-known, but Matisse’s play with positive and negative space, flat swaths of color, and arrangements of simple shapes yield impossibly complex results. I was most enthralled with the surprising scale and physicality of them, the visible trail of his thinking, and his unabashed delve into painting’s decorative roots. It’s rare that I’d brave the crowds to see a museum show twice.”

Klaus Lutz at the Kitchen

“Lutz is the protagonist in 16mm film loops, works on paper, and artist books. All were made in a small New York apartment from the ’90s until his death in 2009. He blended Bauhaus and Constructivist aesthetics into a meandering and hand-crafted dream space. They had the feel of an early 20th-century avant-garde animation with low-tech ocular tricks and layering. A theatrical miniature world, channeling cosmic and mythic forces.”

Ryan Steadman

Matt Connors at Karma and Canada

“It’s hard to explain to non-painters the rare intelligence and creativity that Connors displays with his distilled colors and compositions. He not only filled both of these shows with amazing abstract paintings, he also enlisted the gallery spaces into his chromatic dramas, using entire walls and freestanding panels in ways that touch you optically. And in painting, what matters more than that?”

Egon Schiele at the Neue Galerie

“It always surprises me how much raw power lurks behind the clichéd ideas we inherit about this artist, yet this subtle, unfussy exhibition proved once again that Schiele was practically unmatched in his ability to articulate the enigma of life. His electric drawing style and total disrespect for sexual mores still shocks with a profound eloquence, making you feel as if human beings might not be so bad after all.”

Talia Shulze

Amy Sillman at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art

“I rented a car to make the trip up to Bard for this show; I had to see it IRL. I wouldn’t have known what I was missing if I hadn’t gone, that’s how powerful her work is. (Friends who bailed to spend Sunday in their studios seriously missed out.) I was excited to learn how much of her work involved cartoon imagery, gallows humor, and digital processes — such as frame animations derived from drawings Sillman makes on an iPad — and large-scale installations of digital print sequences.”

Sadie Laska and Sara Magenheimer at Cleopatra’s

“Digital printing, clay sculpture, found objects incorporated in unassuming brightly colored lumpy abstractions, oh my. I work with a lot of these things myself, so it’s always cool to see other artists’ take on them. I especially loved Magenheimer’s found objects-with-clay combo sculptures.”

​Gary Panter

Susan Te Kahurangi King at Andrew Edlin

“Susan is autistic and lives in New Zealand. She captures her internal vision-scape of scrambled kid-culture items, meanders, fill patterns, and landscapes in simple materials. Really something to behold.”

Irena Jurek

Caroline Wells Chandler at Field Projects

“Chandler’s dazzling brand of pop-infused expressionism is as personal as it is political. Dozens of demonic cookies devoured the walls of Fields Projects, while human-sized Sesame Street characters lay languidly splayed out with their unabashedly flaccid members. At once playful and intensely psychological, Chandler revealed himself as an artist who is unafraid of mining the discomfiting parts of our psyches.”

Lucas Samaras at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Samaras is one of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic artists of his generation, and one who hasn’t received the recognition that he deserves. The small and intimately curated show at the Met could have been much larger for an artist of such significance and influence. An obsessive maximalist who touches upon our greatest desires as well as fears, his mysterious and erotically-charged oeuvre eludes any easy categorical assumptions.”

Jessica Sanders

“My favorite exhibition of the year was Cy Twombly at the Morgan Library & Museum. Twombly’s expansive painting, ‘Treatise on the Veil,’ consumes the room. With studies for the painting and the ephemera of what it takes to create such a monumental piece, it pitches the history of the work and a near perfect room. Another favorite was ‘Galerie Neu’ at Gladstone Gallery — the more I went back, the more I wanted to be there. Also Gary Hume’s ‘Wonky Wheel’ at Matthew Marks: color, material, and forms coalesced in mixes that shouldn’t work, but did. And finally, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps Gallery composed of “Photographs I Like”; a show on the floor, titled “To Have and to Hold”; and a show on a piece of paper at the front desk. Perfectly chaotic, completely aware.

Betty Tompkins

Lisa Beck at Jane Kim Gallery (33 Orchard)

“I look forward to Lisa’s shows. She pushes her ideas about materials and processes around. This time out, she had a lot of paintings on mirrors. They were loose and geometric at the same time.”

Claudia DeMonte at June Kelly

“Titled ‘La Forza del Destino,’ this show used good luck symbols from around the world. All of Claudia’s work is centered around women, using materials from bronze, to wood, paper, and paint. There is a lot of subtext here dealing with both power and its lack.”

Orly Genger and James Sienna at Sargent’s Daughters

“This was an inspired pairing. Both artists showed eccentric and compulsive works on paper. Sienna’s work was done on typewriters. Genger’s was a mash-up of superhero limbs. A big surprise to me, and very funny.”

Sean Landers at Petzel Gallery

“Dense, inventive, and beautifully hung, with work in one room referencing work in another. The bookshelves with their poetry of titles were the high point for me. I spent more time in this show than at any I have been at in years.”

Andrew Brischler

Alex Katz at 356 Mission Road

“I saw these massive flower paintings on Instagram incessantly during this show’s three month run, but when I finally saw it while visiting Los Angeles in late June, I was still somehow unprepared for how good they are. Just perfect, joyous, incredibly complex paintings that you want to live with and inside of.”

Larry Clark at Luhring Augustine

“There was a giant collage in this show that featured dozens of photos of fallen teen idol Brad Renfro, taken what seems to be in rapid succession, where he’s showing off his track marks on his arm to the camera. He looks happy, hunky, sweaty, and alive, like all the boys I lusted after in high school. I’m not sure what else to say about this show, but it made me sad, nostalgic, afraid, and ashamed — like a teenager again. RIP Brad.”

Kristen Schiele

Tommy Hartung at On Stellar Rays

“The poetic mix of figurative sculpture and video of Hartung’s last show in 2011 drew me to his newest show at On Stellar Rays. The combination of a dream-like, animated video world with real life horror and video footage blew my mind with its bravado.”

Katherine Bradford at Arts+Leisure

“Bradford’s paintings are layered and playful and full of light with the least amount of contrived effort. This show was a joy of experimentation.”

Ross Simonini

Andy Coolquitt at Lisa Cooley

“Being around Coolquitt’s found objects, light fixtures, and the diverse salad of his shows always puts me in a good mood. His installations hint at antique stores, modernist design shops, Texan yard sales, and what I imagine the curious home decor of psychonauts might be like. I get a simple joy in tuning my eye with his environments and absorbing the attitude of his objects, along with the curious lifestyle they seem to contain.”

Bill Jenkins’s “End User” at the artist’s apartment

“In the fall, Jenkins installed a snaking beast of a sculpture in his apartment, just before he moved out. It was a sort of sibling show to his fantastic ‘Wet Light’ exhibition at Laurel Gitlen this year, and it followed the same general model: using modest construction materials (tape, garbage bags), Jenkins transported light from its original source (windows) and funneled it into a trough, collecting it, controlling its behavior like a pet. A great exercise in hubris! An eerie, unnatural indoor fantasy.”