September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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July 7 to November 7, 2021
79 Montauk Hwy, Water Mill, NY 11976
Parrishart.org

On a balmy evening this summer  at the Parrish Art Museum, in open fields surrounding the museum, the grass swayed to the rhythmic beats and plaintiff chants of an ancient Algonquin ritual, performed by Shane Weeks and Kelly Dennis, members of the Indigenous Shinnecock Nation. The event celebrated the opening of Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim, an exhibition of the artist’s new multi-media works.

The predominantly white audience of museum members and VIPs intermingled with comparatively diverse groups consisting of members of Jackson’s entourage and representatives of communities that are the focus of the museum’s outreach programs. Stirring prescient memories of  historical racial divides, the ritual incantations were intended to remind us that these very fields were once home to Indigenous people living in what have become the “Hamptons,” the necklace of affluent townships strung across the East End. These fields then became the displaced habitat for African American slaves who harvested domestic produce from them. Today, they are workplaces for Latinx workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, fearful about their future, denied the options available to those they serve.

Houston-born Tomashi Jackson (b. 1980) is well known for the prolific social and cultural research that informs her art, most notably for her works at the 2019 Whitney Biennial which explored the destruction in 1850 of Seneca Village, a Black community, to make way for Central Park.  When I toured the current exhibition with Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at the Parrish, she recalled how “Jackson, unfamiliar with the East End community, immediately asked, ‘What is happening here with people of color?’ I told her about the immigration plights of Latino people, often detained by ICE for alleged traffic violations.” This fueled the direction of Jackson’s 2021 artist-in-residence project at the nearby Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities where she created the works and organized the archival material for The Land Claim. While this title draws from the ongoing efforts of the Shinnecock Nation to reclaim their land, it relates to the exploitation of various people of color—including Indigenous, Black and Latinx. Jackson spent much of the Covid lockdown interviewing members of these communities virtually. “I learned about multiple issues,” she told me during a telephone interview, “about the Long Island Railroad intruding on land; Indigenous people dispossessed, violated and exploited while resisting and advocating for themselves and others.” From Donnamarie Barnes, curator and archivist at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Jackson learned that in the seventeenth century the Sylvester family brought enslaved Black people from Barbados to work a provisioning plantation on Shelter Island. Kelly Dennis, an attorney and member of the Shinnecock Nation, told her about the dislocation of Indigenous people from their lands, and the desecration of local burial grounds by developers. And Minerva Perez, Executive Director of OLA (Organization Latino-Americana), updated her about the plight of the Latinx community, their fears of deportation exacerbated by a lack of basic housing, access to public health care, and transportation.

The exhibition begins outdoors, under the eaves of the museum where visitors can listen to an audio montage, simultaneously broadcast stories told by the exhibition’s nine interviewees. Snippets of individual histories intermingle with one another and then, windswept, fade into the very landscape where ancestors once picked potatoes. Something similar occurs visually within the seven multi-media works comprising the exhibition. The narrative, never didactic, evolves as you focus on a particular work. Past merges with the present through Jackson’s deft handling of expressionist color and sculptural materials. Beyond her commitment to social research, however, Jackson is an abstract artist whose merge of form and content is a tour de force.

Consider Three Sisters (2021), constructed on canvas with collaged layers of textiles, paper shopping bags, a storefront-like awning and vinyl strips. Jackson projected photographs of people onto this surface and hand painted their portraits, adding blocks of bold, saturated color, wampum dust, local soil and printed text. The work’s title references an Indigenous method of intercropping three different vegetables—corn, squash and beans— in ways that encourage each variety to thrive. It likewise relates to the integration of ethnic types with tintypes of two early East End Black women residents juxtaposed with more recent photos of women at a Shinnecock family gathering. Jackson layered these portraits on canvas and vinyl strips, painting them with halftone intersecting lines and setting them within and against vivid blocks of orange, yellow, blue and purple. This collision and fusion of  abstract color and figuration causes the photographic likenesses to emerge and fade within the composition, depending on the viewer’s focus, a phenomenon that speaks volumes to the ways in which color as a racial marker defines how white  society perceives people of color. But according to Jackson, “Indigenous, Black and Latinx people are not invisible or expendable to each other and that is the perspective I’ve been empowered by. The issue that arises here is about value and how value is determined: value is a term used with chromatic color and value refers to how people are regarded.”

Color, used metaphorically and formally in this way, drives these works, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Jackson’s integration of color and social relevance draws distinctly from two treatises: Josef Albers’ color theory and Thurgood Marshall’s stunning opinion in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs The Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Albers in his landmark book Interaction of Color (1963) demonstrated how color constantly deceives us because color perception is relative to its surroundings. He also proffered that what appears to be transparency when colors overlap is actually a new color, one that combines elements of neighboring hues. There are uncanny similarities between this language and Marshall’s discussion of the gerrymandering of neighborhoods to segregate public schools.

You needn’t know about these influences to appreciate the compelling narratives and the abstraction in Jackson’s works, but the more you understand the connections she makes between the languages of art and the rest of life, the more poignant these works become. For example, the labyrinth of blue lines in Among Protectors (Hawthorne Road and the Pell Case) function like gerrymandered roadblocks framing news stories related to the Shinnecock battle to recover stolen land. In one section of this grid an Indigenous person blocks the advance of a truck to prevent the desecration of Shinnecock land by developers. In another, a photographed figure painted in red on vinyl strips sings in prayer at a development site where Indigenous human remains were unearthed. As halftone lines in sacrificial red interact, as blocks of light and dark blues intersect, the racial realities history so often forgets, collide, collapse and merge. Jackson’s energized abstractions contrast the transparent with the opaque, the figurative with the non-objective, the ordinary with the extraordinary— in terms both painterly and aspirational.

This well-documented, important exhibition includes an archival display of source materials and photographs, many of them reproduced in the seven exhibited works, as well as drawings by Martha Schnee of the individuals Jackson interviewed for this project. A 96-page catalog, due this fall, includes additional scholarly research by Erni and curatorial fellow Lauren Ruiz, as well as the in-depth stories of the nine interviewees. Jackson considers all these curatorial elements, along with her multi-media works, as integral constructs of this project.

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April 8 to May 16, 2021
124 Forsyth Street, between Delancey and Broome streets
New York City, highnoongallery.com

In her show titled Around the Bend, Theresa Hackett leads us through her year of pandemic induced isolation. Uniformly sized, doubled-sided aluminum panels are hung from the ceiling in a zig zag pattern, cleverly dividing space in the deceptively small High Noon gallery. (A selection of unframed works on paper in the back office are also recto-verso, as visitors are free to discover as they are to handle them.) From the start, it’s clear that Hackett is in control of our experience, guiding us through her DMT-release imagery. A subtle consequence of the presentation of the hanging works is the separation from other gallery visitors. This heightened sense of being close—but not too close—is intrinsic to the borderline spiritual experience of viewing this show.

There’s an excitement in walking around a panel that reacts as you displace the air around it. The paintings are animated, fluorescent explosions, its subtle movements only heightening the push and pull of the compositions. Despite the exuberance of the colors, there’s clearly a dark humor running through the show, a cold wintery answer provided for every warm summer embrace. Each panel acts as its own set up and punchline, thwarting any optimistic thought that may seek to escape an anxious cloud hanging over it.

Tactility and touch are integral to these paintings. There are rich sections built up with marble dust and crushed glass in pictures like Supernatural Flashback (side B). The rock-like forms that make up the bottom left corner are reminiscent of a children’s book meant to contextualize abstract ideas like soft and rough, giving a young human something to grasp onto as it discovers the brand-new world around itself. The magma-like ooze that borders the outer edge of the rock amplifies the sense of geologic time. This work feels ancient, with Hackett here to help us excavate and make sense of all this confusing information. The magma-crust is enclosed with a striped band separating the lava from a giant, all seeing eye that could have strayed from a Philip Guston painting, disguised here as a spiral. Again, Hackett is bringing us back in time, the spiral not only being a signifier of the development of fine motor skills, but according to Alexander Calder, “the first gesture of decoration from primitive cultures”. In Supernatural Flashback (Side B), the spiral is a stand in for some form of intelligence. If it ever had control it is clearly losing it as it is usurped by the earth. We’re witnessing a changing of the guard on an imaginably slow timescale. The materials used to make the work echo this sense of deep time. Diatomaceous earth is a medium made of ground fossils and is toxic to insects, dissolving their exoskeletons. A grim irony comes over you thinking about this mineral, especially when considering a picture of nature in revolt. A normally bright, loud acrylic pigment is rendered matte when mixed with it. This d disorients the viewer, allowing the paint to quietly get in on the metaphor

Elizabeth Murray is present in work like Hiding in The Shadows (side A), where two warm, blue fingers pinch inward to crush an unlucky microorganism. The blue appendages are flanked by dark bands embedded with rock like shapes, cementing their solidity and leaving no escape. We imagine the immense pressure that the amoeba-like form must be under, sympathizing with a blob with spirals for organs. Lines dance across the surface, tempting the viewer to run their fingers across it. Would it even notice our light touch? Probably not, but even an innocent seeming gesture is unthinkable in present company. Hackett seems intent to torture us with surfaces that we will never be able to engage with physically. We are forced to settle for longing glances, keenly aware of the danger of our own contact, no matter how brief.

In firmly enmeshing herself within early humanity’s aesthetics, Hackett helps us connect to a prehistoric sense of newness and wonder overlapped with the unrestrained horror at the unfamiliar and unknown. Her work helps us rediscover an essential part of ourselves, long buried by the development of the self and organized society with all its trappings.  She seems to be searching for the same answers ancient peoples might have been concerned with thousands of years ago, the main difference being they had no access to bright, fluorescent pigments to express them with, and the fossils to be ground up were still being formed around them. There is also the obvious barrier they had of finding a way to survive every day, distracting them from artistic pursuits. The desperate search for meaning, however, remains a constant through time. The answers they found are lost to us, their spirituality mostly destroyed by modernity and its relentless march forward. Hackett meets modernism on its own terms and flips it, tenderly but decisively making the familiar completely alien, while telling grand stories. In doing so, she finds her place within a rich history of mythmaking to make sense of turbulent times.

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September 16 – October 8, 2020
87 South Euclid Avenue
Montauk, New York
bckfineartsgallery.com

In Montauk, NY, BCK Fine Arts is no longer the only commercial gallery in town: Chase Contemporary and South Etna, new COVID-era ouposts of Manhattan dealers, , opened their doors in July. . Out on the tip of Long Island, masks and outdoor receptions are the new norm, but at least the art is on view, in the flesh.

BCK’s recent offering, “Fathers and Daughters”, presents an especially appealing picture of the close relationships and shared enthusiasms of four painters. As recounted by one of the daughters, Elizabeth Kresch, the connections originated one fateful day in the early 1940s, when  a stranger – Leland Bell — stopped her father, Al Kresch, as he carried a canvas along a Greenwich Village street. The two men struck up conversation, and from ensuing shared passions for painting and jazz sprang a lifelong comraderie. Over the years, friendship swelled to include wives and daughters that were (or were to become) accomplished artists in their own right.

The wives, as the exhibition title suggests, are not included in the exhibition.  But this still leaves many paintings to savor by fathers Albert Kresch (b.  1922) and Leland Bell (1922 -1911), and daughters Elizabeth Kresch (b. 1971) and Temma Bell (b. 1945).

Each is represented in BCK’s light-filled space by several works ranging in subject matter from figure studies to landscape and still life. An aesthetic of painterly modernism prevails, with energized colors pacing abstracted compositions. One can detect the influences of Hans Hofmann (with whom Albert Kresch and Temma Bell’s mother Louisa Matthiasdottir studied) and Jean Hélion (a much-admired friend of the two fathers).

What does the selection tell us about paternal influences or generational differences? Arguably, the fathers, especially in their most abstracted work, show signs of being driven to define the historic moment: What does our time demand? What’s the most cogent use of tradition?. How to honor what nature presents to the eye? But the overall tenor of the show is of intergenerational fervor, fueled by independent encounters with forms and colors. Considering the shifting terrain of the art world during the decades these paintings were produced, they reveal a poignant faith in a particular kind of observation-based modernism.

At a glance, differences between the four painters stand out. Temma Bell’s brushy naturalism differs strikingly from her father’s outlined, planar attack; Elizabeth Kresch’s earthy renderings of light contrast with the feathery, atmospheric depth of her father’s more recent work.

But variations within each artist’s work are also evident. Except for the youngest painter, Elizabeth Kresch, the work on view of each artist spans decades – a full 65 years in the case of her father – and this allows intriguing glimpses of personal evolutions of thought. Several luminous Al Kresch landscapes from the last two decades suggest, with their layered darks and lights, the moody radiance of Georges Rouault. By contrast, a crisply geometric still life from 1998 recalls Hélion – a connection more than superficial, thanks to its animated journey through color, from a plate’s deep ultramarine rim, to a pitcher’s mild cobalt blue, to the jewel-like cerulean glow of shadowed fabric.

The thick, robust paint strokes of Temma Bell’s 1970 self-portrait become thinner in her more recent works, yet the impulse of color remain just as strong – and indeed, achieve a kind of austere grandness in an Icelandic landscape from 1981, in which a mountain range, carved by light into delicate gray-purples and deep blues, separates pulses of clouds and shimmers of sea.

Leland Bell’s predilection for black outlines, which are liable to dominate any first impression of his work, are barely evident in a small landscape from 1975, in which colors alone prove capable of locating, feelingly, every element.

And while Elizabeth Kresch’s work spans fewer years, it too reflects shifts of perception. Her small shoreline scene from 2016, with clouds rolling brightly above a wharf’s dark horizontal, contrasts strikingly with a five-foot-tall painting from 2020 of a young woman, clad in a radiant red dress, stretching lithely before a brilliant white wall.

Exiting the gallery, and absorbing once more the ocean air and low skyline of Montauk bungalows, one is reminded of life’s continuity, even in these strange times.  With a last glimpse, through the gallery window, of Leland Bell’s “Family Group with Teapot” (1980) – its figures rising with startling gravity, their hands resolving the movements of arms in wondrous, articulated dances – one may believe that life is not simply continuous, it’s unstoppable.

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October 28 to December 19, 2020
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, tanyabonakdargallery.com

This is as bracing a show as we have come to expect from the German painter Thomas Scheibitz. Didactic and ludic in equal measure, each of his paintings is charged with the task of bringing together opposing forces in a world where art is equally figurative and abstract. If the paintings prove they are something much more than pastiche, it is owing to further dialectic: that the paintings be handsomely realized yet left unsettled and unsettling.

How we know this is immediately apparent in an overview of the exhibition where each painting flaunts its singularity–in striking contrast with shows commonly seen wherein in a bid to convince the viewer of the career, all works on display are merely alike.  Consistency is not the goal when it comes to Scheibitz so much as inner stylistic coherence and purpose.

Pile (all works, 2020) is architecturally disposed, yet freely so. Linear squared elements and planar and volumetric spaces are conjoined in an unforced way to maintain a sense of perpetual experiment and exploration. If ever there was a painting that could claim to be descended from Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten blocks, this is it. Founded in 1837 to induce learning in children through active play, Froebel developed his set of building blocks, which are still in manufacture, to stimulate inventiveness in relating objects in space. Universally known to induce spatial thought and so a child’s portal into adult worlds, this concrete genealogy was very evident in Scheibitz’s previous exhibition at Bonakdar, a show of paintings devoted to the topic of the studio. Geometric and volumetric figures conjoined in a kind of mental space of creative learning. In the current exhibition of deliberately disparate canvases, Pile has all the attributes of creative learning through mental alertness. But as cerebral as this may sound, when viewed up close the painting is typical of the artist’s sensitized craft.

Taken together, Key and the hanging sculpture Magnet , both from this year, are explicit as to method. Scheibitz’s visual vocabulary derives from abstract universal elements that lend themselves to being read as signs, elements he freely permutates Hanging together in Magnet are shapes in outline which create interference such that interior spaces proliferate. Permutations and combinations yield rich figure-ground ambiguities. Key has fused the spatial choices in a flattened quasi-cubist picture plane reminiscent of Juan Gris. Through such revision, Scheibitz has set himself an ambitious program of learning that also extends to embedded meaning and reference. Compelling attention in this regard is Speicher 1072. Budding stalks, perhaps? But this is not adequate to the ambiguities, not so innocent, neither as common motifs nor as universal elements set out in neutrality.

Simple clarity of figural elements in a straightforward-seeming planar space in this painting gives off an air of innocence, but this assumption is soon dispelled by consideration of its title. This contains a reference to Camp Memory, site of the 2014 massacre of Shias and non-Muslims by Islamic State in Tirkrit, Iraq. Implicit in Scheibitz’s practice is an indeterminacy of sense that lends itself to cultural associations of an unsettling kind, without these being allowed to impose themselves. Thanks to reworking the givens of composition, however, the artist leaves us with a difficulty. As spatiality involves social intensity stemming from relative geographical positions, the work induces dynamic intensities through transfigured compositions. We cannot be the facile decoders of signs.

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September 19 to October 24, 2020
54 Franklin Street, between Cortlandt Alley and Lafayette Street
New York City, postmastersart.com

Of the sixty or so drawings in Steve Mumford’s recent exhibition at Postmasters, all of which were done on site in a spiral sketch pad with either pencil or pen and ink, roughly half of them were worked up later with watercolor, using cell phone photos as reference. The uncolored ones range from a furious mass of rhythmic scribbles in Police Try to Separate Back the Blue Demonstrators and Counterprotestors, Bayridge, Brooklyn, NY, Jul. 12, 2020, (2020) to a considered group portrait in Officers Wong, Castillo and Chen at Occupy City Hall, New York City, Jul. 15, 2020, (2020). The speed and expressive qualities of the drawings seem to directly reflect the circumstances under which they were made. The colored pieces, some of which are double sheets, are like studies for full scale paintings. The depictions of the people involved move from quick impressions toward fully delineated types, with clothing, haircuts and expressions fleshed out. Some pieces feel like sheets from a graphic novel with comments and noise effects laid in. The range and confidence of Mumford’s method is extraordinary throughout.

The three main locales Mumford went to were Portland, Oregon; a Trump rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia; and his home turf, New York City. It is immediately evident that Mumford was there to observe, not to satirize or idealize. Everything is treated with the same cool objectivity, even as things get violent. One striking image, “Photojournalists Outside Wyckoff Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, Apr. 7, 2020”, neatly encapsulates some of the questions posed by Mumford’s work. The painting shows a group of photographers from the back, all hung with impressive amounts of camera equipment as they approach a freezer morgue truck behind the hospital. What are they hoping for? It’s just a big truck; maybe an orderly will appear with a corpse on a gurney. I imagine Mumford hanging to the rear with pencil and sketch pad, taking in the scene without any special need for drama, trying to capture some of the paradoxes of the situation. The extended process of his observation is in sharp contrast with the photographer’s quest for a good “shot”. How does his artifact differ from a photo? Does his involvement in the production of the image depend more on memory and imagination, or less? One thing is for sure: His feeling for the reality he sees has a quality of engagement, almost like an interview, something photos are hard pressed to capture.  You feel he is getting to know these people.

At the end of the day there is a conceptual aspect to Mumford’s work that is easily missed as we relate to it as illustration. It is an act of witness, and the paintings are almost a magnificent residue of that act. As with Goya’s “Disasters of War”, the whole presentation states emphatically, “I was there. This is what I saw.”

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October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

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February 20 – March 28, 2020
224 W 30th Street #1005 (between Seventh and Eighth Aves)
New York, monyarowegallery.com

In the small rectangular space of Monya Rowe Gallery, up on the 10th floor of a midtown building, Vera Iliatova’s solo show – titled “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” – takes her viewer on a surreal, nostalgic walk reminiscent of 1980s school day walks in St Petersburg, Russia. Slightly more than half a dozen moderately sized and small oil-and-acrylic paintings completed within the past year hang quitely on white walls. Iliatova reflects on her own past with deep longing for times both missed and long since passed, bringing strange, forlorn, cross-continental energy into the depicted spaces. 

One striking factor in all of these paintings is her master skill of composition. Specifically, the complexity of composition in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (2020) echoes Nicolas Poussin’s Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man (1655). The poses in both paintings are derived from Roman antiquity, as if statues came to life and were captured in a still. The stillness in Iliatova and Poussin’s work is eerily similar but the subjects could not be more different. Iliatova handles multi- figure compositions with Poussin’s grace and, in this particular work, also ties in the architecture of stairs with organic rhythm. While the staged nature of her painting – in a contemporary context – may at first glance appear uncomfortable, the classical construction feels unmistakably familiar. In this case, teenage girls with wandering glances appear hanging out together, but remain emotionally removed from each other in an industrial building amid an anachronistic landscape outside the window. Iliatova’s painting thrives on that familiarity: young women, most likely school-age (right about when Iliatova herself moved to the United States from USSR), are positioned in poses suggesting conversation and interaction. Upon closer observation, however, every single figure appears implicitly lonely, gazing down or past the others. Where Poussin’s depictions of such gazes and poses play up the drama, in Iliatova’s work they mirror a state of being, one representing both nostalgia for a time since passed and a lost opportunity for connection. Upon first glance, one of her other paintings in the show, The Ties That Bind (2019), has a similar sentiment to Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1638). Rhythm and composition are striking in the same way, but the meaning and the somewhat bizarre arrangement of young women in a park in Iliatova’s work sets them apart from the 17th century painter by bringing them into the contemporary. 

Similarly, Iliatova’s color palette reflects on the particularity of time and place. Granite grays cast a shadow over this body of work. The warm pink gray colors are reminiscent of riverbank pedestrian paths along the Neva and Fontanka Rivers in St. Petersburg where so many school girls have spent evenings hanging out after classes. Iliatova uses a distinct palette – well known to any St. Petersburg native – evoking the region’s long, dark winters, its rainy summers. The stone city that was built on swamps by Peter the Great is close to its inhabitants’ hearts, even the ones who left at a budding age. 

Iliatova uses paint to visualize the intangible subject of nostalgia. Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the setting, there is a clear, recognizable sense of longing for the past. She doesn’t just yearn for one time or place, though, but a full bouquet of places, styles, relationships and interactions. Even though the light and feel is straight out of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s landscapes, the buildings in some of Iliatova’s works, such as The Big Reveal (2020), are somewhat industrial, bringing it into a modern context. The landscape is perhaps a wink at 18th and 19th-century painters, but the most fascinating mishmash occurs in the fashion of the figures. The combination of sweaters, dresses and patterns ranges from the 1960s to the 1990s and even today, where vintage clothing finds a new life through thrift shops. For example, a reclining figure in the foreground in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible wears a turquoise dress; this dress is reminiscent of a 1980s-era Bloomingdale’s catalog, but the adjacent figure could easily be taken as a contemporary passerby on the street in Gowanus. The mystery comes from the artist herself, who finds her models’ outfits in crevices of Brooklyn’s thrifting shops. The choice is conscious and deliberate as Iliatova paints and repaints every figure to be both relatable yet a standalone monument to time. How does one capture time in a still image? Iliatova seizes these moments by painting her subjects in passive actions such as reading, stretching or gazing outward.  

The painterly application of brushstrokes suggests both timing and an allusion to classical painting. Iliatova is a superbly skilled painter, who depicts her world with poetic intelligence. She employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention. Every element of application is thorough with realistic and painstakingly depicted figures to almost Gerhard Richter-esque, blurred backgrounds. She marries elements of the history of painting within bare square inches of her paintings, but does so seamlessly and effortlessly.  This expert mix of contemporary and classical style, combined with surreal anachronism transport viewers to another time and place while maintaining an air of familiarity. 

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January 9 – February 15, 2020
515 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, albertzbenda.com

In contrast to the figure based abstract paintings shown at Tsibi Geva’s first exhibition at Albertz Benda Gallery in late 2017, the current show presents an ensemble of pattern-based gestural abstractions. Titled Substrata, the recent work focuses entirely on what Geva believes is the ground structure of painting, the very foundation of what he sees while walking around that inspires him to paint, anything from the terrazzo tiles under his feet to the mesmeric glimpses of urban Mediterranean patterns on the buildings around him. There is little concern for going outside the parameters of materiality or concretizing the narrative scope of what surrounds him.  Over the years, Tsibi Geva’s paintings have persistently taken their own course. There is nothing explicitly formal about his surfaces. Nor do his paintings attempt to follow the direction of a style of pictorial nominalism. The artist prefers to remain conscious within the act of painting rather than insisting that the unconscious is the derivation of his aesthetic. Despite Geva’s fierce attention to the gesture, it is not possible to place him in the context of “action painting.” This is not the origin of what Geva is about. He is a thinking painter, not a romantic.

Born and raised on Kibbutz Ein Shemer close to sixty-nine years ago, Geva is a painter with a significant history, which needs to be taken into account. In the process of growing up with an architect father, the concern for seeing and understanding structure was a preeminent aspect of his education. Eventually, the artist’s acute awareness of structure discovered a counterpart that leaned inadvertently in the direction of decoration whereby the grid –influenced by the presence of Bauhaus buildings in Israel – would eventually give way to what Geva called “entropy.” He would soon designate “irregular patterns’ that included ornamentation as having expressive content as a complement to formal structure.

While growing up in relative proximity to a Palestinian village, Geva had indirect, though distant access to experiencing the vernacular architecture around him. This included various collaged improvisations he witnessed in Bedouin homes built on the high desert region near the border (that eventually changed after 1967). Even so, these innately organic structures offered the young artist an alternative way of perceiving form – in essence a type of form without form. This complementary relationship began to merge into his work as a painter. This became particularly evident in a series of paintings based on Keffiyeh scarf patterns, worn by Arab men, which appeared to some viewers of Geva’s paintings during the 1980s and 90s as a semi-radical motif.

The paintings currently on view at Albertz Benda open another door for Geva. It is a somewhat ironic door in that it returns to the notion that the concept of structure – whatever that might be –is no longer within the realm of isolation. Given that all the paintings in the show are untitled, and painted in acrylic on canvas (with one painted in acrylic and oil), and all executed in 2019, (except one from 2018), I will proceed according to measurement and description. The painting I wish to address is constructed with six panels of which three are rectangular and three are square. Together the six panels constitute a single large square painting on the rear wall of the back gallery.

The focus on structure, of course, has not gone away even as the gestural force of the painting lends its overwhelming presence. Emphasis is given to the quadrilateral shape, the scale, the relative isolation of each gesture, and to the color black. The painted backgrounds of the various canvases reveal light earth colors with sparingly applied touches of the three primaries, which are scarcely noticeable. Of the various works chosen for display in Substrata, this painting carries the most significant magnitude. The balance between the entropic gestural forms and the unique architectonic construction of the painting’s support appears to have found a profound match. Nothing is left hovering.

The paintings on view in Substrata are indeed “entropic gestural forms.”  But they also have a structure buried within them, a sense of geometry given over to floating particles in space, reminiscent of the torn paper works of Hans Arp or intensely applied gestural fields where the paint ruptures our ability to find a discreet form.

There is a distance between language and entropy in terms of how form is identified. But for Geva, the form becomes less important than the repetition.

There is no real narrative in these paintings, no exact timeline. There is another vertical rectangular painting where the hardedge sectioning has been obliterated and replaced by square black nets in with two nondescript banners in red and blue monitoring one another near the top. It is doubtful to suggest that the particulars have meaning in such paintings. Therefore, we turn to the allover process – to the unclear borders, the borders Geva knows so well – not only in the academic or political sense, but in the painting sense. Here we may grasp the sense of a painting, where in Geva’s case, everything is let loose, where the turbulence becomes amenable and striated, deceased and overturned, one layer upon another. The process assumes to be endless. However, once the structure is intact, and once we discover how and where it exists, the painting comes alive on its own terms. We have no further to go other than to acknowledge where we have been. Finally, we are able to open the door to the present.

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December 20, 2019 through February 13, 2020
1 Main Street, between Plymouth and Water streets
Brooklyn, #mainwindowdumbo

Playing with recycled materials across two- and three-dimensional surfaces, Etty Yaniv’s site-specific installation, at Main Window in Dumbo, Run Off,  transcends visual boundaries,. (Comprising a window space on Main Street in DUMBO, Main Window has featured Brooklyn-based artists since 1980.) In this piece, Yaniv showcases her ability to use the language of material to subtly insert deliberate, familiar allusions to specific places while spurring dialogue around ecological awareness. Her unexpected gathering of  materials such as ribbon, plastic, bits of paper and other ephemera in combination with her own photography, transforms an extremely restricted space into an awesome new reality whose gravitas transcends its actual scale.

Windows are a prominent theme in Yaniv’s work, so it’s a natural progression to see her work actually installed in one. It acts both as a commemorative element and a barrier between the viewer and an untamable scene. The historic architectural gold framing gives the work a monumental quality, elevating the composition as a timeless representation of the past, present and future. The scene on display – water rushing down subway stairs – is well situated, evoking images of the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy in one of the neighborhoods most affected by its destructive path

Her use of color is strategic and intentionally limited. The photographic elements within the installation – whether fragments or the main photograph of the stairs– are mostly black and white while the wild elements of plastic and mixed material are predominantly blue with sporadic splashes of other colors. The color is not spontaneous, however, but is strategically placed to elicit a message of conservation and call attention to the natural elements within the work.

Run Off assumes an almost interactive quality through the glass, as reflections of viewers and city life overlay the installation. Translucent outlines from adjacent fences seem to contour the stairway imagery, as the city’s skyline casts an imposing silhouette of buildings, fire escapes and other rigid structures along the upper portion of the piece. At night, the installation is further transformed as light casts ghostly reflections of viewers on top of the work, which only serves to underline the message of human influence on the environment. We are more than mere observers.

Beyond its environmental concerns, Run Off tells a dynamic story that changes with each subsequent viewing. Overall Yaniv’s allusions to escalating environmental crises are subtle and poetic, evoking trepidation and awe at where it might lead Environmental anxiety intersects the day-to-day realities of New Yorkers with images the gritty metal subway stairs completely immersed in water.

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