As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once,” gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset, we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990s series “Stacks,” for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha (1997), is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga (1999), has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as Collective Head, Head on Head, or Head that Happened, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster-like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed (1998), casting Abacá paper onto molds using blueprints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas) (1997), a two-dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building (2003), titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color (2009-10), Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing (2015), shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as “white gold,” Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery, finger-like indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block (2012), a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood (2012), is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr. Bolardo (ca. 1738), with rakish hat and mustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory (ca. 1912-14) with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

The post A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES: Arlene Shechet in Boston appeared first on artcritical.

September 16 to October 24, 2015
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Clothes cascading from a washing machine, with the compositional grace of court drapery.The world upside down from the perspective of a baby held by a man with a beer in his other hand, her arms and legs flared out in joy. Men’s limbs packed abstractly into a picture frame as a hand rummages inside red shorts.

The imagery of Wolfgang Tillmans is deceptively artless. There are over 100 new works in his show and most could be shown with his work of 20 years ago with no break in style. Within his parameters, however, he constantly tests ideas about photography all the while documenting friends and his immediate environment one moment, activist and gay subcultures the next. In times like our own when lifestyles and personas are so carefully mediated and “curated”, all awkwardness edited out, Tillmans’ quiet insistence in framing content that is gritty, quotidian, or overlooked becomes a bulwark against slick image control.

Tillmans’ first published photographs, of Hamburg nightlife, came out in the British magazine i-D in 1988, a moment when hierarchies of art world, fashion and magazine cultures were being redefined. (Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition also happened in 1988, for instance, as artists sought to sidestep the art establishment). i-D magazine was started by former Vogue art director Terry Jones; intrigued by the punk scene, he wanted a forum that reflected street fashion and genuine youth culture. i-D’s acknowledgement of diversity and idiosyncratic beauty were expressed through its photography and design choices and it became a precursor to European ‘anti-fashion’ magazines such as Purple Prose and, in their early years, Self Service and The Face. This ‘realist’ aesthetic was refined by photographers Corinne Day, Jurgen Teller, Terry Richardson, David Sims, and Nigel Shafran, many emboldened by the fearless work of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark in the US and Araki in Japan.

Though Tillmans had been influenced earlier by northern British bands and the sophisticated album covers of Peter Saville, the new ‘realism’ had seeped into music and magazine culture as Tillmans night clubbed and studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in the UK between 1990-1992. It is significant after only eight years he became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize.

Tillmans understood early the need for the avoidance of closure. Each image is a result of micro decisions, from “how would I take a picture of this?” to making a final edit that is not too easy or familiar, and appears to contribute to his hidden compositions that often have a slow reveal. He restlessly recontextualizes his work, each installation constituting, in itself, a separate art piece, the exhibition a labor of relationships between architectural space, images and scale. At his Zwirner show there is a photograph of presentation in progress, studio still life, a, 2013, with large prints covering walls, but then unexpectedly smaller pictures high, creeping up to the ceiling en masse like a colonizing army of ants. Tillman’s makes no distinction between his work appearing in a magazine spread, commercial gallery or fine art museum. Prints are unframed, taped or pinned to the walls. From the outset he used context as a tool for his own ends, ignoring preset rules about how photographic work should be presented or given value. His career has also straddled the divide between analogue and digital photography with remarkable integrity and grace, which this show now emphasizes.

Tillmans lives and works between London and Berlin, and the sensibilities of both cities inform his vocabulary. Tender, candid, intimate portraits of friends and their abstracted body parts, still lives of fruits, or activists in gritty streetscapes are all shot frankly, often in overcast, northern light. But he works hard to make the audience work too. With Patti Smith, Glastonbury, 2015, we see domed camping tents under the grey festival sky and it takes time to figure out that the distant angled projector screens filled with Smith’s face are her oblique portraits.

In Simon, Sebastian Street, 2013, is a portrait of one of his closest friends whose knowing gaze is directed at the camera. The image is so low key it is hard to figure out what the pull is, why it is compelling. Only a study of the elements around him reveal that the lights above his head and the lines of the table radiate from a vanishing point that ends at the eyes, giving the compositional aura of a Renaissance saint. We revisit other old friends of the artist, Alex and Lutz, who in another i-D magazine story from 1992 appeared refreshingly raw and liberated sitting semi-naked in trees with long, open PVC coats. Twenty-three years later they look at us in Alex and Lutz, Hindenmithstrass, 2012, with the same unabashed matter-of-factness and close cropped hair, the past co-existing seamlessly with the present.

Different from Tillmans portraits are the exploratory and process driven ‘Silver’ series, which reveal his imaginatively technical side. These are experiments with the alchemy of photography where residue and silver particles are re-photographed, or alternatively left physically on top of the image, expanding concepts of photography as image or object. His photograph as object would have sat nicely alongside work in Peter Bunnell’s 1970 landmark show ‘Photography Into Sculpture’ at MoMa, with exquisite work by late ’60s and early ’70s artists such as hugely influential UCLA teacher Robert Heinecken, who worked outside traditional ideas of photography; Richard Jackson,who used negatives as sculptural forms; and the young Ellen Brooks who re-mixed photography and other materials into new objects.

Tillmans is an outlier, very different from the previous generation of German photographers like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, influenced as they were by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their attendant high seriousness. Critics accused him, in the 90s, of photographing shallow, vacuous, unimportant subject matter, but there is no corresponding surface dispassion or lack of depth to his work to accord with this criticism. The random, slightly chaotic nature of his compositions captures meaning and tenderness and accumulates in his oeuvre into a form of romanticism. Tillmans has indeed said that photography was a way to deal with “bearing the meaninglessness of everything”.

A striking, large inkjet print has been given pride of place in one gallery. It shows a common garden weed growing between mossy paving stones. The colors are lush and nuanced as only the best printing can give, with rich dark greens and purples. Caught in a ray of diffused light, the weed is erect, plucky and fragile. It describes perfectly Tillmans concerns, that beauty is there right beneath our noses, unexpected and between the cracks. You just have to look.

The post Right Beneath Our Noses: The Beauty in Wolfgang Tillmans appeared first on artcritical.

As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once”, gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990’s series ‘Stacks’, for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha, 1997, is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga, 1999, has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as“Collective Head”, “Head on Head”, or “Head that Happened”, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed, 1998, casting Abacá paper onto molds using blue-prints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas), 1997, a two dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building, 2003, titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color, 2009-10, Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing, 2015, shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as ‘white gold’ Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery fingerlike indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block, 2012, a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood, 2012, is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr.Bolardo ca.1738, with rakish hat and moustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory ca. 1912-14 with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

The post Unruly Grace: Arlene Shechet in Boston appeared first on artcritical.

March 17 to August 16, 2015 (Uklanski Selects closes June 14)
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City

The soaring banners that greet visitors in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall are “living photographs” by Piotr Uklanski, the subject and selector, respectively, of exhibitions currently on view. The banners reconstitute a work of his from 2007, Untitled (Solidarity) in which aerially shot images of red and white clad soldiers at the Gdansk shipyards spell out the name of the independent trade union, ‘Solidarnosz in one image while the same word is seen disintegrating, in the other, as three thousand soldiers spill away. 1990 was the year that Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland and Uklanski was able to immigrate to the United States.

Despite this theatrical flourish, Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs overall feels a bit thin in places, particularly in a clustering of early work.

The show opens with images from Uklanski’s series, Joy of Photography 1997-2007, where he appropriates and plays with ‘how to’ ideas of photography. By faithfully following step-by-step instructions to achieve the perfect photograph from a Kodak manual – resulting in colorful blobs of soft focus flowers, a chiffonade waterfall, a tropical setting sun – Uklanski critiques the utopian promise of self-expression available to all, His project remains conceptually interesting even though the eventual aesthetic outcome is utter visual ennui

If Joy of Photography implies a mistrust of photography as a means to an end, the work that follows, The Nazis (1998), questions film’s reliability as a source of historical representation. This is a floor to ceiling wall installation of looming close-ups of Hollywood actors that are the embodiment of the American heroic ideal: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, William Shatner, even ‘ol’ blue eyes’ Frank Sinatra. To Uklanski, the volume of Second World War films speaks to a subconscious fascination and fetishization of the Nazi aura, portrayed in a sanitized and glamorous way. The American audience are to be kept safe and at a distance from the Holocaust reality by experiencing a dual consciousness, of a trauma, but appropriated and mediated by the faces of familiar stars.

In a nod to the infamous 1974 Artforum double page spread paid for by Lynda Benglis depicting herself nude, gloriously defiant and brandishing a dildo, Uklanski collaborated with curator Alison Gingeras on the piece ‘Untitled’ (GingerAss ) (2002). This portrays Gingeras, his partner, naked and lit from behind in a glamorous, erotic style that brings photographer Guy Bourdin to mind. Like Benglis, the artist paid for the image to appear in Artforum. Despite all the cheeky bravura however, their piece is compromised here by what seems to me a sheepish sentence within the wall text where the museum feels the need to tell us that Gingeras was “his romantic partner (they are now married).”

Benglis’s 1974 work was a sophisticated feminist critique, using her own body satirically on her own terms within a predominately male art context. Why should it make any difference whether they are now married, a fact offered in parentheses like an apologetic disclosure– as if the audience, after seeing a naked rear end, need reassurance that this couple still follow conventional societal norms? Such a patronising attitude offends the spirit of Benglis’s radical gesture and undermines Uklanski’s oeuvre.

Piotr Uklabski is known for heterogenous work ranging from large scale ceramic installations, fabric pieces, paintings, film and photography to his infamous relational aesthetic piece Untitled (Dance Floor) 1996 for Gavin Brown’s Broome Street space. It appears that this polymath has put together Piotr Uklanski Selects from the Met Collection with ease: it is by far the better of his two shows, compelling and engaging, evoking a pre-Internet, old-fashioned pleasure in making connections between disparate images and objects.

Using the themes of Eros and Thanatos, the “life force and death wish”, to guide his choices, Uklanski culled artefacts and images from eleven curatorial departments in a refreshing, occasionally shocking display. One gallery wall is hung with many of the photographic greats: Nadar, Alfred Steiglitz, August Sander, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Martin Munkasci and Malick Sidbé are here, to name a few. Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier 1936, hangs nearby the surreal Laurie Simmons Walking Gun 1991, and a Pierre-Louise Pierson from around 1863-66, Games of Madness, of an elegant woman looking drolly through a small picture frame back at the viewer feels subversive yet so fresh

A sly wit is seen in a subtle repetition of patterns from different images: a tangle of lesbian’s legs hard at it, shadows of a man’s arms and legs, and the abstract close-up of a horse’s hip and thigh with leather and metal harness. One small painting hung so low one has to kneel to see it properly appears to be of a half dressed young boy who seems about ten lying on a bed while a woman, naked, her face hidden by long hair, fellates him. This is Picasso’s La Douceur, (The Pain) (1902). The ‘boy’ is in fact Picasso aged twenty-two, joking about orgasm and le petit mort. Painted over a hundred years ago, the sexuality and sexism are both still raw and palpable.

After the subtle and tonally muted photographs, Uklanski’s sculptural work, Untitled (Sacre Coeur), 2015, a visceral glistening heart in red resin, is a jarring experience. It is placed next to a cool, sleek yellow jasper Egyptian fragment of a mouth from around 1350 BCE. It almost works, her lips a wonderful contrast of ideas, temperament and form, but ultimately Sacre Coeur is too brash for her distinct, inscrutable, beauty.

Poignantly, near the end of the exhibition was a fragment of a right hand and forearm in marble, Greek, ca. 300 B.C. The written text stated: “this sculptural fragment may have belonged to Eros holding a bow or a torch “. It felt like amongst this gathering of talent from the era of photography, a hand was reaching out from the past.

Many thanks to Woman Around Town and Eleanor Foa Diestag for credited photographs above.  We apologize for the absence of Polish accents on the artist’s name and titles, a problem we are trying to fix.

The post A Sly Wit: Piotr Uklanski at the Met appeared first on artcritical.

February 12 to March 12, 2015
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212-977-7160

The opening photograph of this exhibition of around 30 vintage prints, some of them previously unseen, sees the show’s title, ‘I’m trying my hand at fashion photography’, scrawled in red ink in Woodman’s spidery handwriting. The inscription falls below an image so wonderful in its off kilter poignant economy that it takes a while to take in the nuanced details. Within it, Woodman stands facing us, hands over her eyes, wearing a white dress textured as if quilted, its slight thickness imparting a creamy softness to its folds. Behind her is pinned a skewed quilt, dirty white and slightly torn, against a wall with joins like a giant graph, a large circle peeking down from the top of the frame. It is a minor symphony of textures and composition.

The show focuses on Woodman’s New York years between 1978 and 1980, a difficult period for the young artist: no longer supported by study or residency programs, she was battling to find resolve to continue her practice, gain acknowledgement from the art establishment and pay the rent. Although much is made of the tragedy of her early suicide, the year after this period of her work at the age of 22 what really comes across is that making successful photographs was an act connected to joy and satisfaction, fueled by her indomitable, restless energy.

An image in a completely different mood has Woodman sitting on the floor, the sweep of her hair in a loose top bun caught in frames of falling sunlight, echoed by the casual satin cascade of her dress. Her eyes are thoughtful, looking to the side, a small gothic chair in a corner adding the final compositional touch. The astonishing depth of Woodman’s understanding of spatial and geometric relationships of the body and other objects within the pictorial frame elevated her work, no matter how deceptively simple an individual image might be, to the highest level.

An example of this sensitive arranging is shown in a monochrome photograph where Woodman stands sideways to the viewer, arms above her head so that she forms a black line against the wall. Parallel to her is a hanging skinned fox, its head, legs and tail dark, vulpine and dramatic against the surrounding white. On the floor is a carefully placed decorative plate, positioned on an invisible diagonal to the bottom corner of a painting in the top left of the image. The unobtrusive alignment of painting to Woodman, to stole, to plate, is an example of the precise visual harmonies that lent Woodman’s work its subtle dynamics and formal rigor.

One of the highlights of this sometimes-uneven selection was a rare series done in color that showed a more polished, mature Woodman. These are shot in empty rooms with pastel green walls and pale pink molding, her body sheathed in a green knit dress. The new element of color is added to her compositional mix as she throws shapes through a mirror climbs a door post – all Titian hair and bare legs – or peeks through the camera at us, sensual yet coy in peep-toed shoes.

Woodman is less convincing when she emulates other photographers. A series shot at night outside the New York Public Library in a style halfheartedly reminiscent of Helmut Newton sees a model drape her limbs alongside the giant stone lions. Elsewhere, we have a girl all lipstick and glamour in a bathing suit reclining, in the mode of Guy Bourdin, alongside stuffed, running wolves. Both sets have elements of Woodman but those seem hesitant mixed with the slicker, hard-edged styles of photographers that were so much about the male gaze.

In Woodman’s imagery, she was often both subject and photographer. Just as a dancer uses her body as an instrument, Woodman used hers, alongside many props and clothes as a tool for the camera. Like Cindy Sherman, she controlled the gaze, which with Woodman was unambiguously female.

It was only days after seeing this exhibition, while thinking about how intrinsic and poetic to my understanding of Woodman’s oeuvre her nude self-portraits were, that I suddenly realized that most of the subjects in the show had been clothed. That I hadn’t noticed is as it should be— her work transcended all of that.

The post Gaze Control: Francesca Woodman at Marian Goodman  appeared first on artcritical.