July 10 to September 18, 2021
1395 Boston Corners Rd, Millerton, NY 12546
thereinstitute.com

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster once famously wrote. How many times in the last year and a half have we heard the declaration, “We are all connected,” despite a period forever defined by the intolerable hardship of “social distancing,” when many families suffered enforced separation from their loved ones, and many people tragically died alone? The global pandemic has dramatically proven that our categorical “connection” is both a bane and a boon—while we can potentially all infect each other, we can—and must—also attempt to reach out to each other.

Brenda Zlamany’s extraordinary array of 500 portraits in The Itinerant Portraitist, on view through September 18 at the Re Institute in Millerton, New York, provides a powerful and poignant testament to our connected humanity. In an era when selfishness, and the “selfie” have ruled, her work, going back a decade, redefines the contemporary notion of “face time.” Indeed, one could consider each of the individual faces in her myriad, rainbow coalition of physiognomies, the ultimate un-selfie.

Zlamany’s pictorial project began in 2011, funded by a Fulbright grant. The earliest works in the show were done in over 30 aboriginal villages in Taiwan, which she visited with her young daughter, Oona. The artist travelled light: Zlamany, an accomplished oil painter whose commissioned work is on permanent display at Yale University, stripped her practice down to the bare and portable minimum; paper, pencil and watercolors.

Aided by a time-honored tool, an old-fashioned camera lucida –a technique she learned from David Hockney, a close friend whom she met when she worked as a printmaker in the 1980s- Zlamany sits face to face with her subject and sketches a basic outline. Then, over the course of a single hour, during which she sensitively but persistently prompts her sitter to divulge deeply personal stories, she finishes the form, rendering the portrait in quick, expressive watercolor strokes. Think of it as speed portrait painting (a much more intimate interaction than speed dating.) The subject, while the focal point, is also engaged in a kind of confessional. “I am trying to capture something that happens between us over the hour of listening to them,” Zlamany says.

The completed portraits brim with life in all its stages, from cradle to grave. But they also serve as a memento mori. They are quintessentially ephemeral, a delicate layer of pigment on paper that captures a fleeting moment of time. Zlamany’s chosen medium and technique perfectly convey the transience of human life.

The exhibit has been divided into groups of portraits of indigenous people living in far flung locations, from Alaska to Saudi Arabia, from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, to the sunny vineyards of Sonoma, California. They include Cuban taxi drivers, Alaskan national park rangers , girls from an Abu Dhabi orphanage, and New York art world denizens. They start with infants, and move on to the very old, one of whom died the day she was painted.

The approach is egalitarian. “Art is a like an elevator,” the artist says, “And I wanted to stop on every floor. Everyone has a chance to get involved.” At the end of each session, Zlamany documents it with a photograph of the subject proudly holding their own portrait, which they, rather than the artist, has signed.

The exhibit begins with a bang: an enormous image of Noura, an Arab woman in a hijab, proudly festooned on the entrance to the vintage red barn that houses the gallery. (And sure to provoke local Trumpsters.) Inside the gallery, the walls are papered with rows and rows of hundreds of faces, cheek by jowl, creating a tessellated effect. The hanging isn’t random but organized so that the various indigenous groups are differentiated by the dominant colors in their portraits. Alaska, for instance, includes images mostly done in green; Saudi Arabia mostly done in black. The first impression of this vast display is overwhelming, but soon the eye focuses on the individual faces, in all their many differences.

As she travelled to more than a dozen destinations over the last decade, Zlamany clearly honed her craft. One of the first images, of a sleeping baby, is tentative and impressionistic, the artist’s brush barely grazing the page. By the time she painted the images of the elderly in the Hebrew Home, done in 2017, Zlamany has mastered her form, creating decisive works that powerfully portray her subjects, simultaneously signaling the political and social implications of their specific habitats (climate change, for instance, as seen in Alaska and Sonoma wine country; the quality of life in nursing homes.)

Covid-induced masking also provided Zlamany with fertile ground: in Zlamany’s work, both masked and unmasked, the eyes emphatically have it. “Eye contact is an exciting element and helps you gain trust. And from my Saudi paintings I knew how to get a likeness with just the eyes,” she says. “But this was a lot of fun, because instead of focusing on facial features, there was so much pattern and decoration and abstraction. It was a great break.”

Despite her initial terror at being in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an epicenter of the virus, Zlamany did a series of 85 socially-distanced portraits of mask wearers on her building’s loading platform, a welcome release from isolation for both the artist and her subjects. And in her most recent series, done in 2020-21, she captured more mask-wearers in upstate New York, some of which are among her liveliest paintings. Take her portrait of Gary, his vibrant blue eyes seen through round black designer glasses, his “Exit Trump” mask in red and white and black color-coordinated with his shirt.

From traditional-costume wearers in Taiwan, (one woman in an ornate headdress) to weathered firefighters in Alaska to young concertgoers in Oxfordshire, Zlamany has documented a swath of the globe in all its diversity. And while the stark images of the nearly obscured Saudi Women in Hijab are haunting, the watercolors of the workers in Alaska, Cuba and Sonoma, humbling, and the portraits of the New York art world members engaging (Zlamany did one a day for an entire year; check out Deborah Kass, Katherine Bradford, Alex Katz, Lilly Wei, David Ebony, Peter Drake, Linda Yablonsky) perhaps the most moving series in the show is “100/100:” the end-of-life portraits done at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, which has been given its own wall.

Unlike the other portraits – meticulous high-quality prints of the original watercolors considered too fragile to hang – these are the original works, previously framed by the Hebrew Home. Says the artist of this 100-portrait project, “It was probably one of the most emotionally challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. To go in there and deal with life and death at that level. Some people died before I painted them, some people died shortly afterwards. I painted a Holocaust survivor who had been in the camps with her twin sister. I listened to stories that were heartbreaking, but then there were some incredible lessons. All portraits are about mortality, but in many cases these were literally final moments. When I got home, I would be emotionally spent, often in a fetal position. For me it was life-changing.”

Despite their pain and disability, and even the “post-verbal” condition of these subjects, Zlamany has managed to capture not only their frailty but their remarkable level of dignity. The portrait of Mabel, crowned with a blue turban, and looking, it seems, into infinity, is regal. And although Ruth wears oxygen-tank tubes and cannot hold her elderly head erect, the half-smile on her face brings it to life. For Zlamany, this was revelatory. “I never painted wheelchairs before, in the beginning, I tried to flatter people. But then I started to paint what I saw. And people loved it. Instead of having me flatter them, they wanted to see how they looked to me. They wanted to discover who they were through my eyes. They wanted that honesty. Ruth is a painting that tells you that. That is someone who is being seen at the end of their life, with their breathing tubes, yet she is truly delighted by her portrait. I tried to find the person who was there.”

With The Itinerant Portraits project, Zlamany has created a multifaceted celebration of life. The show ends as it begins, with a bang: hanging from the ceiling, so that in order to exit the gallery, you either have to push past her or genuflect below her, is a larger-than-life image of gallerist Julie Torres, wearing a pink “Pussy Power” t-shirt.

“It’s just a subtle thing about the power of women,” Zlamany says. “I am a female artist painting portraits, and traditionally portraiture has been the domain of men. And so I just wanted to assert the power of women: Noura on the front of the barn—a Saudi woman who just got the right to drive. And the power of my own vision as a female artist: the female gaze on the world.” And then some.

The post The Ultimate Un-Selfie: Brenda Zlamany in Millerton appeared first on artcritical.

In 1990, Lucian Freud found his next great subject, an over-the-top Australian performance artist named Leigh Bowery, whom Freud first met at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, where Bowery had done a week-long installation piece starring himself in an array of exotic getups a few years earlier. Wynn Evans and Cook arranged a meeting between the artist and the flamboyantly-dressed performer (sequins were a favorite motif) at Harry’s Bar, because they wanted to “get one back on Lucian …all those sequins. We thought we’d get Lucian to put that old beige paint away.”

Freud had seen Bowery around before and been impressed by his monolithic legs. A massive man capable of extraordinary physical flexibility, Bowery had the big bald head of a Buddha. Using Bowery as a model over the next four years, until his death from AIDS on December 31, 1994, Freud produced some of the most astonishing work of his career, paintings monumental in both their scale and sensibility.

Freud once said that sculpture was his first love, and he owned a copy of Rodin’s Balzac, which occupied a place of honor at the head of the Holland Park stairs, guarding the studio entrance. Bowery’s form naturally lent itself to a sculptural approach, and Freud energetically exploited the potential of both his huge figure and his ability to maintain contorted poses. The two were highly attuned to each other. As a performance artist, Bowery, who had many body piercings, was usually turned out in full regalia, from quirky clothes to jewelry. But when he first entered Freud’s studio, he simply stripped and removed all his studs, without Freud’s bidding. He wore no makeup, and he shaved himself from head to foot, to afford the artist even fuller exposure.

In the first portrait, Leigh Bowery (Seated) 1990, his figure overwhelms a red armchair. Indeed, Freud kept enlarging the canvas with new strips in order to contain him. And yet, as large as he was, Bowery had an almost dancerly grace. Even in a seemingly straightforward pose like that of Naked Man, Back View (1991–92), where only the model’s back is shown as he sits on a low ottoman, Freud managed to capture a sense of both the baroque and the Buddha-like embedded in Bowery’s presence.

He was inspired both by Bowery’s “wonderfully buoyant bulk” and “the quality of his mind.” Freud described Bowery, as “very aware, very relaxed, and very encouraging in the way that physical presence can be. His feelings about clothes extend to his physiognomy even, so that the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned.”

Nude with Leg Up, painted in 1992, shows Bowery reclining on the studio floorboards, amidst a sea of Freud’s painting rags, one leg improbably propped up on a green-striped mattress. For once he looks life-size rather than larger than life, since Freud has him anchor the center of the composition, which is made up of the mattress, the rags, the floorboards and the bottom of a window. In Leigh under the Skylight (1994), the model is standing on a covered table, his head poking up towards the ceiling. Although his ankles are delicately crossed, his huge body is torqued in a pose that recalls Rodin.

Freud also painted Bowery lying naked on a bed with Nicola Bateman, who worked with him and married him not long before his death. And the Bridegroom (1993) is a painterly performance piece, a theatrical composition rendered in a hushed palette that heightens the drama. A bed, heavily draped in a beige sheet, sits in front of a black folding screen. The background of the painting consists simply of brown floorboards and yellowish walls. Bowery and Bateman, both nude, lie in state on the bed, sculptures on a pedestal, their heads turned away from each other. Bateman, a thin but rounded figure, has one slender ankle draped over Bowery’s thick thigh; her long hair flows off the edge of the bed. Named after a line in an A. E. Housman poem (although Bowery wanted Freud to call it “A Fag and his Hag”), it’s a one-act tour de force. “I’ve always been interested in bringing a certain kind of drama to portraiture,” Freud said, “the kind of drama that I found in paintings of the past. If a painting doesn’t have drama, it doesn’t work; it’s just paint out of the tube.”

Nicola Bateman appears in several other paintings, including a poignant footnote to Bowery’s death, the strange piece Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway (1995), which shows the naked Bateman perched in an alcove above a wardrobe. “As he was coming towards the end of painting…it was around that time that Leigh started to die… And I would sit up there. And I spent the whole time just thinking about Leigh…and that he’s dying right now. I think it gave me a little bit of breathing space from the situation.” When Bowery died, Freud had his body flown back to Australia.

Excerpted from “Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open” by Phoebe Hoban. ©2014 by Phoebe Hoban. Published by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest April 2014. All Rights Reserved.

The post “Amazingly Aware and Amazingly Abandoned”: Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery appeared first on artcritical.

Joffe blatantly references the more psychological—and painterly work of —Alice Neel (on view at David Zwirner through June 23) and strongly relates both to the stylized, affectless portraits of Elizabeth Peyton and the faux pornographic work of John Currin. But Joffe uses the canvas as a room of her own to explore contemporary femalehood—not so much the eternal feminine as the external feminine, writ large.

The in-your-face impact of her paintings comes as much from scale as technique. These are big blowups of women, exaggerated and poster-like. There is no visible brushwork or impasto—instead there are obvious drips. It is in these drips, casual yet deliberate, random but not really, that Joffe’s latent expressionism lurks.

Oddly, one of Joffe’s strengths is her sense of purposeful restraint. She is to painting what Raymond Carver is to short stories: an expert minimalist. While employing more detail in her approach to portraiture than Alex Katz, whose legacy she also clearly inherits, she refrains from full-blown realism, implying rather than mirroring reality. And yet she captures something ineffable—a certain mystery that every woman exudes. Who is that blonde clutching her baby as if it is an unwilling fashion accessory, the fingers of its little hand splayed, Neel-like, as if to quote its mother? Or the placid, almost-beautiful woman with the dazzling green eyes and striped shirt, strangely missing any décolletage or cleavage, her sensual lips just a bit too close to her prominent nose?

The two most realized paintings in the show, both done in 2012, are, ultimately, the most interesting: Woman in a Red Flowered Dress, whose commanding presence and disapproving mouth cannot be ignored, and Self-portrait Sitting on a Striped Chaise Lounge, a nakedly honest portrait of Joffe herself, seated on stripes—a direct reference to Neel’s influence in its nudity, composition, and evocative expression that pointedly evokes Neel’s own famous nude self-portrait (on a striped chair) made when she was 80. While the other six paintings suggest an interesting narrative, these two canvases are the interesting narrative.

We live in a Facebook world—that seems to be the subtext of Joffe’s work. And yet even Facebook profiles hint at something deeper than the merely superficial. Joffe’s reductive approach reaches its apex, perhaps, in “Blonde in a Lace Coat,” a pale painting that is nearly pure ephemera, portraying not so much a woman as a wisp. While her minimalism has its uses, in the end it is content, rather than form, that satisfies. Joffe should take an unfashionable risk and imbue her gallery of femme fatalities—everyday vampires of a sort—with more real flesh and blood.

Phoebe Hoban is author of Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking/Penguin, 1998.)

The post The External Feminine: Chantal Joffe at Cheim & Read appeared first on artcritical.