May 19 to June 25, 2016
532 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 367 9663

The sudden embrace of Nicole Eisenman as culture hero should come as no surprise. She’s a prolific painter whose unleashed imagination and hungry heart have produced memorable and disturbing works of art. She also happens to hit the diversity buttons of underappreciated woman, queer, and gender fluidity that animate current cultural discourse. And of course the trifecta of MacArthur Fellowship grant, survey exhibition at the New Museum, and concurrent first solo show at Anton Kern gallery, has obviously made her the focus of attention. But what makes Eisenman important, rather than merely au courant, is her approach to ambiguity.

Something significant has happened to Eisenman’s paintings since the work shown in “Al-ugh-gories” at the New Museum. Much of “Al-ugh-gories,” though compelling, is fairly easily parsed, and critical interpretations seem remarkably consistent.

At Anton Kern, the truly subversive nature of Eisenman’s vision flowers when she focuses on “normal” everyday life. Her new focus recalls a passage from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange; that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it; that no one set of practices or relations has a monopoly on the so-called radical or the so called normative. 

The more one gazes into the mechanisms of these paintings, the more it is apparent that ambiguity has become the medium with which she now paints. In so many different ways, ambiguity animates every new Eisenman painting. If it isn’t the uncertain gender of her figures, it’s a subway train’s direction of travel in a station, the era in which a party occurs, whether a shooter is gangster or cop, or the nature of the figure/ground relationship.

The tour de force Grand Guignol here is Another Green World (2015), which is also the title of the Brian Eno album the central character is examining. A huge 128-by-106-inch party scene that is inhabited by 28 figures (by my count, if you don’t include Grace Jones on an album cover) of indeterminate gender and sexuality who are making out, doing drugs, listening to music, eating, drinking, dancing, conversing, smoking, moon-gazing, or passed out under the coats on the bed. Oh yeah, and despite the ‘70s disco ball, vintage turntable with vinyl LPs, and lines of coke, there is a figure raptly gazing at a cell phone, which throws the whole era of the party into question. The binaries of male/female and gay/straight and past/present quickly break down, as we try to assign gender to all but a few obviously female figures. It is interesting how reflexively we desire to do this in order to navigate our social world. But here it doesn’t matter; it’s a party, everyone’s welcome.

In Another Green World Eisenman also successfully confronts the figure/ground problem that has increasingly challenged her as a painter. Eisenman has great skill as a draughtsman, but her talent lies in expressively depicting people. Against the blank paper, there is no problem, but in her paintings she has to invent the environment in which they occur. The details of background have evidently always been less compelling to her, and might have seemed like tiresome labor. With scaled up canvases, the figure/ground dilemma has become more urgent: how to animate every inch of the canvas while preserving the hierarchies of attention needed to construct emotional legibility. It has been interesting to watch Eisenman tackle this as an idea she seems to have realized that she needed to address.

Part of her solution has been to increase the number of figures so that sometimes much of the background is now other figures. But more interestingly is the way she now considers paintings as a jigsaw puzzle of shapes. And whether they are the positive shapes of feet, hands, faces, clothing, and objects, or instances of negative space revealing surfaces of carpet, furniture, table, or landscape, Eisenman treats each shape as an arena of painterly invention of differing facture, not letting big expanses of emptiness dominate. What keeps it together is her masterful drawing, creating space through exaggerated changes in scale, juxtaposing oblique surfaces coexisting in impossible perspective, and establishing different points of focus using her sharp tonal color sense.

Despite the cacophony of Another Green World, Eisenman gets the whole drama to revolve around the brightly lit woman at the center raptly studying the eponymous album, and rubbing her nose in reaction to the bump of coke she has probably just snorted. Our attention rotates to the lower left to the kissing couple, a topless woman sprawled upside down on the couch in the embrace of an impossibly blue figure of indeterminate gender, though perhaps the stubble on her legs indicates female–but that’s how closely you have to look.

There are many compelling paintings in this show, which also invite rigorous analysis particularly Weeks on the Train (2015). Despite focusing on a central young person slouched in a window seat working a laptop, whose cat in carrier occupies the aisle seat, Eisenman pulls off the neat trick of rotating the windows 90º to fit parallel with the side of the vertical canvas. This pushes the viewer’s perspective high above the painting. From this point of view, our focus is pulled to the cartoonish Guston-like head ensconced by big red headphones, with a single, large bulging eye in the bottom foreground staring out the window. At the level of this eye, the view out of the window becomes thick with impastoed booger-like flowers.

Though more emotionally subtle, another focal point of this show is the tenderly haunting Morning Studio (2016). Here Eisenman eschews the butch/femme brazenness of her two pre- or post-coital chapeau’d women in Night Studio (2009) at the New Museum and replaced them with two embracing figures whose erotics are more maternally consoling than flatly conversational. In Morning Studio, the faces are painted with different levels of specificity but it is the boyish person with ochre skin who fixes the viewer with a wary stare, and who is comforted by a more generically represented topless woman who is also simultaneously reaching a hand beneath her jeans. Eisenman then explodes this intensely personal moment with references to the world out a window and the universe via a large spiraling galaxy computer screen, which watches impassively over the scene. This is where we see Eisenman striving for an emotional complexity that she achieves specifically in her recent paintings.

The measured construction of her paintings provides a pointed contrast with the still wonderful drawings in the second, back room of the show. They demonstrate how Eisenman’s work has previously been driven by her drawings, which are fairly direct depictions of any idea that crosses her mind, no matter how silly, heretical, or gross. Her drawings are pure id, she doesn’t seem to judge or censor, and they have a spontaneity and freshness that has always been thrilling and noteworthy.

But this show seems to indicate that Eisenman’s present ambition, her desire for significance, now lies in her paintings. Earlier paintings seemed often like large elaborations of various ideas originating in drawings and fleshed out with details in paint. Now the paintings seem to develop on their own terms, with the ambiguities and complexities that the act of painting promulgates seizing control over the content. Drawings are direct and fast and in the present, while paintings are slower, much more calculated, and connected to a history that is mostly white and male. In her new paintings, we see Eisenman sublimating the immediacy of her drawing talent and examining historically established protocols that she either honors, flouts, or fucks with. It is now in these mature paintings, that Nicole Eisenman is finally confronting her artistic superego.

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March 1 to March 31, 2012
?532 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 367-9663

Ellen Berkenblit has been confounding expectations since her first solo show in 1984, a trend that happily extends to her current exhibition. Her dissonant, emotionally charged palette, with dark colors that would be at home in an Ernst Kirchner, is pushed to extremes in 20 new paintings filling Anton Kern’s cavernous space.  And intense palette is just an opening salvo, for while riffing on her established lexicon of female profiles (with a high-heeled leg or two thrown into the mix), Berkenblit manages to flip the traditional figure/ground relationship literally on its head.

One is immediately aware that there is something especially unsettling going on here.  The regular heroine of her past work – she of the bobbed nose, Betty Boop eyes, and shy demeanor – has been replaced.  In her stead is a pointy-nosed, gap-toothed, grinning lass, her flying blond hair – pink ribbon notwithstanding –displaying an undeniably greenish tinge.  Witch imagery, invoking tangential thoughts of spells, altered states, and female power, is alluded to but ultimately not insisted upon.

The main character’s changed appearance, while noteworthy, is not disturbing. Rather, it is her now extremely casual relationship with gravity.  Whereas previously Berkenblit’s figures existed, for the most part, in a world that recognized the existence of gravity and corresponded to traditional notions of top and bottom, her new heroine might enter the paintings from any angle: upper right or left or even, à la Georg Baselitz, from the top.  Looking at one particular installation of three larger paintings, it is hard not to resist seeing her blond protagonist doing a full loop-de-loop.

This is about more than figures in flight.  There is a conceptual inversion at play, recalling for this reviewer Shusaku Arakawa’s 1970s series of paintings combining text with colors in which legibility was undermined by the image’s visual logic.  In a similar way, looking at Berkenblit’s Broken Pane of Frosted Glass, 2012, there is a natural urge to isolate, identify, and create a narrative from the various elements: face, quarter moons, stars, leg, high-heel.  But, as with the Arakawa’s, the colors continually take precedent and pull the viewer’s eye contrary to representational logic.  The dichotomy created between figuration and abstraction simply refuses to coalesce, a frisson that supercharges the surface: it is not just the heroine of the paintings doing back-flips, but the entire figure-ground relationship.

Berkenblit has never shied away from experimentation and risk in her work.  In one past series she painted on metal grates (a series of works that looks increasingly better in retrospect) and she has worked exclusively in black and white for an entire exhibition.  This latest body of work consolidates a decade of her thinking about color, image, narration, and abstraction, the resulting optical turmoil leading to visual pleasures exciting and wild.

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David Brody, Karen Gover, and Ara Merjian join David Cohen to discuss Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks, Jim Lambie at Anton Kern, Suzanne McClelland at Sue Scott, and Katia Santibañez at Morgan Lehman.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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MARK GROTJAHN; BLUE PAINTINTS LIGHT TO DARK ONE THROUGH TEN
Anton Kern until February 28 (532 W20th Street between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 367 9663)

JOE FYFE
James Graham until March 10 (1014 Madison Avenue between 78 and 79 Streets, 212 535 5767)

Reductive art induces reductive histories of art.  When you think about art in terms of lessness and what is left out it is hard not to historicize, to see individuals in terms of a great march forward—or compromising retreat—towards or away from Minimalism. In this ne plus ultra1960s movement abstract art achieved its most severe exclusions, beckoning an end of painting, or its least its submission to the object, soon to be followed by the triumph of pure concept.

Individualists frustrate such neat theorizing.  Almost simultaneous with Minimalism was the movement that—logically—ought to have waited patiently in the wings for a few years: Postminimalism.  This word described the gradual reinvestment of personal touch, expressive feeling, rich surface, and human presence in nonetheless still radically pared-down artworks.

Despite the trumpeted demise of the medium, a new kind of painting emerged that stalked emptiness, as if torn between giving way to historical inevitability and resisting it.  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden fitted that description.  Another of the masters of that moment was Robert Mangold.  His whole career has been, so to speak, danced on a pirouette—his paintings are perpetually on the tipping point between reduction and regeneration.

Two elements stand out as the hallmarks of his aesthetic: the shaped canvas and the drawn arc.  To these can be added a third—whether stained in a color or rubbed using a drawing medium like graphite, he goes for an achieved (rather than simply given) surface.  While never overtly gestural, his art always recalls a hand that made it.   Cool, but not cold; impersonal, but not person-free.

Mr. Mangold also likes to flutter between the sensual and the cerebral.  His new show, at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous W22nd Street venue, offers a dozen  in a series of “column structures”.  They can all be taken in at the center of this vast space as a single gestalt, becoming highly architectural in the process; or they can demand individual space and time.  The supports are made from various joined canvases to form such shapes as a “T” in “Column Structure I” (2005), a trunk and branch in”IV” (the remainder of the series are 2006), a funnel-like shape in “V”, an anvil in “VI”, or less readily, or quite unnameable, shapes in others.  The ability or not to describe the shapes linguistically seems to determine different formal experiences from one column to the next.

The compositions are further complicted by scored lines that can easily be confused with the actual division between abutting canvases; the lines roughly adhere to some sense of a grid that stretches beyond the actual work, but no strict logic or system is apparent.  Each work is a singular color, stained in acrylic with even modulation but slight fluctuations—again, the hand is present but not insistent.

The curves, drawn by a superbly controlled hand, are neither mechanical nor organic.  They might be seen as responses to the shaped supports, but equally could be the formal force that determines those shapes.

The cumulative experience of all this back and forth between possibilities is a subtle, classical, and highly refined.  The Minimalist Sol le Witt, when describing his own return to more lyrical and sensually involved picture making, once spoke of wanting to make art he could show Giotto.  Mr. Mangold might want to show his work to Poussin.

Mark Grotjahn is a natural complement to Mr. Mangold—his supremely elegant show offers slight variations on a singular composition and formal idea, and a narrative sense of development as the eye follows this progression the Anton Kern Gallery (another elegantly sparse post-industrial space.)

My first visit induced a negative response.  Unlike this artist’s restrained installation of richly colored pieces at the Whitney Museum recently, the dark, barely scrutable canvases with their repeated compositional formula seemed gratuitous and stingy.  But a second visit on a sunny day revealed their subdued sophistication.

Mr. Grotjahn is fanatically committed to his chosen motif: a central vertical strip from the horizontal center of which emenate spokes of slightly thinner stripes.  Coming with modernist ancestry, this device is familiar from various Futurists and Orphists not to mention Marsden Hartley, and evokes a sense of a lighthouse emitting rays.

In the dingy half-light of my first visit this seemed like a series of black paintings but in fact they eschew black altogether to track a progression from a dark but vibrant ultra marine to an almost pitch black navy blue.  All painting needs light but these are enriched by the dependence, which they dramatize.  The strokes are compulsively even but the brush creates striations that seem to glisten under light, looking a bit like the sheen of black vinyl LPs.  (Jason Martin, the British painter who shows at Robert Miller and LA Louver in Mr. Grotjahn’s city of residence, LA, has made a life’s work from this effect.)

While the motif and its driving effects are always present and insistent, they eventually take a back seat as the slight and subtle differences between each work assert themselves.

Joe Fyfe is a brutalist.  His art is not so much reductive as severely blunt.  Often, the “canvas” is more striking than the paint: in “La Glorie” (2006), for instance, a picture painted in acrylic on terrycloth, felt, linen and burlap.  Colors and textures alike are instrinsic, in other words, rather than applied.  The composition has a central zip of various colors (painted bars or collaged strips of colored material) placed off center on a burlap ground crudely roller-painted in thin, dry white.  The surface submits to the support.

Historically he comes out of art of early 1970s: He was much influenced at the outset of his career by an exhibition of Blinky Palermo, an artist included in the National Academy Museum’s current “High Times, Hard Times” survey of painting in the wake of Minimalism.  He is also one of several Americans (others of his generation being James Hyde and Craig Fisher) who have looked hard at the French Support-Surface movement.  But his new body of work seems much less concerned with the semiotics of painting as earlier efforts.

The exhibition includes things made in the last four years and is more compositionally busy than the previous show at the same gallery.  Titles reflect his travels in Asia (a recent Fulbright took him to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos).  There is still an insistence on texture over shape, however; while “Hoan Kiem” (2006) seems almost pictorial in the way menhir-like shapes populate a white groudn with a gray skyline, the eye is still detained by the rough scrapings away and rude applications of paint accentuating the materials beneath, in this case felt, muslin, burlap and gauze.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 22, 2007 under the title “Minimalism with Feeling”

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“Richard Bosman” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery until November 13 (529 W. 20th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

“Carroll Dunham” at Gladstone Gallery until December 4 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh, 212-206-9300

The late work of Philip Guston, so axiomatic to the 1980s, was the harbinger of a new, “Bad” painting. Thanks to an almost insolent expressivity and gauche personalism Guston made a goofy appeal to the primitive, in the forms of graffiti and cartoons, and thereby defined the decade.

Somehow the influence has never gone away: Bad painting was just too much of a good thing. It could be that much of Guston’s importance to succeeding generations of painters had to do with his extreme, urgent expression of a perennial struggle (a kind of romantic-classic opposition) between the formal and the informal, the polite and the brash, felt by every creative painter worth his or her salt.

The winds of Gustonism gust through various Chelsea galleries right now. At Anton Kern, for instance, there is a young German painter named Bendix Harm whose self-portrait even resembles the errant Abstract Expressionist, with sad eyes and Picassoid distended nostrils captured within turned-up lapels. There are shades of Louise Bourgeois and Francesco Clemente in the image, too. The head surmounts a pyramid of cushion-like forms each containing the word “moi” repeated in a child-like scrawl.

Richard Bosman is a natural carrier of the Guston gene: He studied with the master in the 1960s as a pioneer student at the New York Studio School. His other influential teacher there was Alex Katz, who included Mr. Bosman in a group show last summer at Colby College, Me.

Mr. Bosman can compete with Guston – or any artist – in terms of the depths of vulgarity he plumbs. His paintings are like oversized illustrations, shiny and brash. His Americana borders on kitsch, only there’s an energetic ambiguity at play: Equal degrees of earnestness and satire animate his depictions of rural museums, Civil War enactments, historic monuments. He gives us a row of Shaker dresses, a vintage 19tjh-century forge, a barn full of collectibles, Herman Melville’s writing desk, cutout figurines of lumbermen in a way that collides 1980s excess with a timeless American innocence.

Mr. Bosman offers a very different experience of kitsch than, for instance, Jeff Koons, where smoothness and slickness underline machined banality (though, as if to tease out a comparison, Mr. Bosman’s collectibles include toy lobsters like those favored by Mr. Koons.) Mr. Bosman’s painthandling is as ambiguous as his subject matter: The freshness and precision with which he paints wet in wet belies the allusions to painting-by-numbers in his style. The dresses, for instance, recall Wayne Thiebaud in the succulence of their delivery.

Initially so disconcerting, his paintings end up appealing precisely because of their parity of style and motif. His vulgarity has a perverse purism: Though illustrational, his illustrations are original, seemingly derived from observation rather than appropriated photographs or engravings. His images are vulgar in the edifying, original sense: powerfully plainspoken, in a common language.

”]Carroll Dunham is looking more Gustonian than ever, though his new show at Barbara Gladstone is equally haunted by the shade of Picasso. This comes across in broadly delineated, dark scaffolds, filled in with brushy dabs of pink and blue, and with the sense of priapic figures disporting themselves by the sea.

Mr. Dunham revels in the fleshiness of pink – its exposed, sexed, puffed up tipsiness. His forms juggle penile and testicular associations with other body parts and facial features to build up an absurdist portrait of an Ubu Roi type – sometimes we get to see his top hat – luxuriating at the beach. The Guston-Picasso influences come across stronger than in previous shows, despite the fact that his earlier work had more of the gutsy impasto associated with the last, loose painterly splurges of those men. By comparison, these new images are thinned-out, aqueous.

Even though he only really hit the artworld’s radar screen in the 1990s, Mr. Dunham remains a quintessential 1908s artist in terms of scale, speed, and subject: Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring must be counted as influences as strong as Picasso or Guston.

Mr. Dunham paints diptychs, presented here in overbearing frames, with halves differently oriented to emphasize spatial and compositional displacement. Some of the pairings read as the same forms from different perspectives. He pushes to an extreme, in this repetitive series of paintings, the oxymoronic hard-edged messiness of his style, with definitive outlines playing off gratuitous splatter. He is masterful in his handling of these opposing qualities, and they are the key stage effect in his drama.

In the back room, Mr. Dunham displays a set of sculptures in laser-cut steel on rather prissy coffeetable-like pedestals. These are charming enough, at first, in their nursery exuberance. Seeing his forms in cool black metal and three dimensions, however, only serves to emphasize how little intrinsic value there is to his cartoonish vocabulary – a mere vehicle for something profounder and more satisfying in his painting. The whimsy and humor quickly wears thin. The sculptures look like Tom Wesselman playing a joke at Antony Caro’s expense.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 4, 2004

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