May 5 to July 15, 2016
860 11th Avenue (between 58th and 59th streets)
New York, 212 237 1439

“BASTA!” at John Jay College’s Anya and Shiva Art Gallery, revisits the relationship between violence and contemporary art in Latin America. Curators Claudia Calirman and Isabella Villanueva present works by 14 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Latin American artists have always exposed social struggles of their countries, but “BASTA!” focuses on the conflict between representation and reality — inherent in the use of violence as a theme for art. “How to represent violence without aestheticizing it to the level of the banal?” asks Calirman.

Paintings, installations, and video works are distributed throughout the main gallery, while two videos are featured in darkened rooms. The exhibition is conceptually divided into two main groups: works that use violence as a tactic and those representing violence primarily through aesthetic means. Visitors find the latter when looking at Argentinian collective Mondongo’s Calavera 5 (“skull,” 2009–13), a six-by-six-foot Plasticine skull in which artists depicted tiny scenes of political crimes. Peruvian Giancarlo Scaglia, in his painting Stellar (2016), refers to the massacre of political prisoners — from the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso — by the Armed Forces, in the 1980s, in Peru. White star-like spots over dark painted backgrounds correspond to the position of bullet holes on the walls of El Frontón prison, where the massacre occurred.

The play between aesthetics and violence is also explored by Brazilian Alice Miceli’s In Depth (landmines)/Colombian Series (2015), a series of six horizontal photographs that seem to depict a serene rainforest with mysterious red and white markings stuck to the ground. Each photograph shows the same location with slight variations, as if the artist moved closer to the markings. But reading the work’s caption the viewer learns that those are land-mine fields in Antioquia, Colombia, and realizes the risk implicit in the making of the piece.

If Miceli deals with risk of death through photography, Teresa Margolles creates a tension between death and life, in which aesthetics is not emphasized. For Irrigación (“irrigation,” 2010), Margolles diluted, in 5,000 gallons of water, the blood and bodily fluids of people killed by drug cartel violence in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The video shows the rear of a truck dispensing water along Highway 90, between Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Her action can be understood as a displacement of the dead, in which blood-evoking symbolisms are absent perhaps to emphasize the “invisibility” of unidentified bodies found in Mexican morgues: it is as if she turned blood into water to “recycle” violence.

Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo, instead, inflicts pain into her own body, producing blood as a tactic. In the video Perra (“bitch,” 2005), she wears a long, black dress, sits on a chair and uncovers her naked right thigh only to incise it with a knife. She carves the word PERRA, letter by letter, into her skin. Harder than looking at the moment of the incision, it’s to see Galindo moving the sharp knife over her leg, as if foretelling the pain. She softly holds her skin so that blood drops don’t slip away from the carved flesh, while the camera shakes above her.

Galindo’s self-mutilation refers to the culture of violence against women in Guatemala, where girls have been found mutilated with the word bitch written on their genitals. Female genital mutilation is a practice that occurs around the world, in different cultural contexts: by making that violence visible, Galindo pursues the pain of a ubiquitous crime. Though it is not the same pain caused by abuse that often happens in the private space, Galindo nonetheless becomes a victim as the viewer becomes a witness — she puts violence under the precision of her knife, complicating its aestheticization.

Other works in the show deal with the nature of systematic violence. In the video Testimonio (“witness,” 2012), Guatemalan Aníbal Lopez, who died in 2014, invited a sicario, a mercenary from Guatemala, to respond to the questions from an audience of art enthusiasts at dOCUMENTA, in Kassel, Germany. The video begins with the sicario’s silhouette behind a white screen — to protect his identity — framed by theatrical red curtains. The man explains his profession saying that he pays for his studies at the San Carlos University by doing “social cleansing” for the Guatemalan army, which pays him based on each victim’s social class. The images toggle between the man’s silhouette holding a microphone and shots of the audience: white men and women looking stupefied after hearing the sicario’s words.

Participants ask him questions for 40 minutes; as time passes by some people in the audience start to smile, even though many keep frowned eyebrows and bulging eyes at disturbing answers such as “One day I had to drown a lady but she wouldn’t die so I smashed her face with a stone,” or when asked if he cares about the spirits of the people he kills, “No, this is just my profession, I don’t have any feelings about it.” The raw brutality of his testimony contrasts with the silly naivety in the expressions and questions the audience asks such as, “Do you believe in God?” or “Do you play violent video games?”

In Testimonio, the performance’s participants compulsorily perpetrate a second violence: one marked by a temporary contract with the sicario’s mode of living, even though not free from judgment, and even though it occurs through an understanding of that man’s life as a theater. Many of the participants seem to judge both the murderer’s and the artist’s gesture as unethical, while others clearly believe the whole thing was staged: they laugh and look doubtful. The work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, as it tests the limits of reality and truth, defying the boundaries between crime and art. Although the work plays with fiction, it may not matter if the man’s words are make-believe or not: as much as we would like to deny it, violence is institutionalized and can be profitable not only for individuals, but also for entire Latin American elites or imperialist governments that maintain their home countries “safe,” while violence spreads elsewhere. Lopez’s Testimonio disrupts the judicial system of the countries in which the sicario’s crimes had been executed as it snubs the borders between the geopolitical North and South. Ultimately, the anonymous sicario becomes a Trojan Horse whose speech unveils the violent reality of his developing country, but also the silent brutality of privileged countries — represented in the piece by the art world — casting their investigative gaze over the tragedies they’re directly or indirectly complicit with.

Adopting the logics of a confession, Testimonio shows a distinction in the way violence can be perceived across different countries: for the sicario, violence was so natural that it was a rule, not an exception. Because deadly crime rates in Latin America are among the highest in the world, violence is perhaps more palpable in those countries, whereas some people from developed countries may perceive violence through the spectacularization of “moments of exception,” such as when a terrorist act or a mass-murder occur close to home. But in many developing countries violence is endemic and normalized, not understood only through climax: high unemployment, inequality, and broken educational systems, among so many other reasons, produce living contradictions, such as that sicario’s life.

Less than through easy aestheticization, and more through elaborated actions, contemporary Latin American artists who expose and denounce violence ask us to look at it and learn how it works, for it’s through our bond with victims — and also with perpetrators’ minds — that we can seek change. Few of the artists in “BASTA!” offer options for healing, but some open a space for mutual mourning and for a critique of a global reality that expands well beyond the domains of Latin America.

The post Implicated Viewers: Looking at Violence through Contemporary Latin American Art appeared first on artcritical.

May 21 to August 12, 2016
300 South Mission Road (at East 3rd Street)
Los Angeles, 323 406 2587

300 South Mission Road in Los Angeles seems a bit of an unlikely setting for Maccarone’s LA gallery. With graffiti-scarred warehouses and chain-link fence, long dusty blocks of faceless industrial buildings, and wildflower and weeds struggling at the edge of the pavement, the area seems a curious locus to find Paul Lee’s coolly introspective painted constructions.

A few short years ago there was not even the idea of having a gallery down here, much less the western outpost of an established New York dealer. Now there are several, and before you can say “demographic-shift” there will likely be dozens.

No surprise, then, when Lee presented a body of work radically different from what viewers have known, in his solo show “Layers For A Brain Corner.” The works in the show divide into two groups: four large wall drawings/sculptures, and constructions with painted tambourines affixed to shaped canvases, with their interplay of round and straight edges creating an optically vivid whole. These tambourine pieces may arguably reference the body, albeit obliquely.

In works such as Mind Mountain and Washcloth Weight (all works 2016) Lee uses a motif common to his oeuvre: bath towels, here purposed as drawing elements. Lee has excised everything but the towels’ edges, dyed them with black ink, and employed them as lines for his huge wall drawings, which he calls “negatives.” Terming these giant wall pieces “sculptures” is a stretch, though they do protrude from the wall at a towel’s thickness. Lee’s message from what he calls these “spills” and “tumbles” is clear: life is precarious, fault lines are everywhere, the center rarely holds.

Although Lee’s use of towels has previously been described as signifiers of queer culture by critics such as Holland Cotter and Robert Hobbs, the new work lives at the brink of pure abstraction. All that remains of what Cotter terms “the mechanisms of gay coding” is color; indeed, Lee’s palette is a key to his meanings, especially the wan lavenders, the cornflower yellows, the paler shades of white, off-white, dreary gray, deathly black. Lavender in particular has a long association with gay pride, one hypothesis being that it begins with masculine blue, to which is added some feminine pink. As for the evocation of corporeality, Lee told me, “The ‘skin’ of the canvas places them in a technological cultural context that is not immediately obvious. It’s a stand-in for the skin and the body. Sometimes skin is exposed, sometimes it’s hidden in color.”

In “Layers For A Brain Corner,” Lee is edging further away from the sculptural combines for which he is best known — works with bent soda cans, some imprinted with a photograph of a young man’s face, light bulbs, and string. He is moving in the direction of painting. “I was trying to narrow my parameters, so I can learn more,” he says.

“This was going to be a paintings show,” he continues, “but I wanted there to be a dialogue between these two bodies of work. I call these ‘touch paintings’ because tambourines are activated by touch. The first tambourines I made had rectangles on them, and I thought of them as being like touch screens. The touch screen is part of our daily life, you can touch an image and it can lead you to another. The image becomes a path. It’s a visual space that becomes active in a new way. I think it is a new space for painting to happen.”

The specter of the late Ellsworth Kelly hangs heavily over the work, especially in formal terms, though Lee also cites Kelly’s impact on culture. As one enters the gallery, the shaped pieces first seen seem to summon Kelly. “The things I get most from Kelly are that he took the landscape, reconfigured it, abstracted it, and made his own version of it; he made his own space,” Lee says. “I like that shadows are a source for some of his works, how he took something slight and made something glorious and celebratory of it. And I really enjoy that he was a gay artist, that his work speaks of liberation through abstraction.”

Asked about the meanings of the works’ titles, Lee admits to a somewhat random method: “I didn’t want to call them ‘Untitled’ anymore, because I didn’t want people to think they are just designs. So I’d look hard at them, and just put down whatever came into my head.” Sometimes the title lends a poetic flavor to the work, as in Very Slightly; in other cases he veers toward the literal. For example, a piece with a tambourine painted half black and half white, suggestive of a half-moon, is called Either Side Of The Night.

If Lee’s new work has roots in Kelly and in Josef Albers, its seed was planted by his mentor, Jack Pierson, and result from his encouragement. Pierson, like Kelly, has made a career of “taking something slight and making something glorious of it,” and the lesson has not been lost on Lee. Luck, and talent, and associations with influential and generous friends — having these elements is certainly as vital to an artist’s progress as their ability to draw and paint. But knowing when to shed the obvious reference points of his forbears, that is the trajectory point, the crucial moment, that not all artists attain.

The post Making Glorious Something Slight: Paul Lee at Maccarone, Los Angeles appeared first on artcritical.

April 3 to May 15, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

For her fourth solo show at Rachel Uffner, in the gallery’s second floor space, Sara Greenberger Rafferty has made a series of mixed media works exploring domesticity, gender, fashion, and the page/screen. The show’s title, “New Works: Dresses and Books,” creates an immediate connection between the forms and contents of two kinds of consumables. The material combination is striking; Rafferty uses a combination of acetate, Plexiglas, inkjet prints, acrylic polymer, and hardware. Hardware is necessary for holding the work to the wall and is always listed as a material. There is always more hardware than is necessary, pointing to the necessity and the décor of objects.

The 10 works are of varying sizes and most take the rectangular or square shape of the page or screen. Dress (all works 2016), is cut to the shape of a dress itself, comprised of photographic images combined with acrylic polymer. They appear worn behind the glass. The images — vintage undergarments, designer dresses, and screenshots — are simultaneously flattened and thickened (each piece of Plexiglas is a half-inch thick). Rafferty points to dresses and books as generic objects: ones that require bodies to perform them. One of the books in the show — rendered in two dimensions, like the dresses, under clear acrylic — is Recommended Reading. The outline of Dress appears on the cover. A Hélène Cixous quote repeats down the length of the dress; it begins “I am entrusted with the dress,” and ends “I slipped them on to go to war.”

An artist’s book, and Recommended Reading (2016), with a text by Melissa Huber, accompanies the show. Its contents range from advertisements (current and old) to essays to clothing catalogues to collages. Rafferty shows us where she pulls some of her sources. There are drawings of dresses and bodies inhabiting dresses. There is a dress that contains a list to be checked off, with words wrapping around the body:

How do you feel?

CONFUSED
MODERN
NATURE-LOVING
SCARED
IN LOVE
OLD FASHIONED
MOODY
FAT
EXCELLENT
SPIRITUAL
CREATIVE
RESERVED
CYBERNETIC
SICK
EXCITED
DREAMY
INTELLECTUAL
BACKWARDS
YOUNG

ALL OF THE ABOVE

The image of the dress is empty but appears to be inhabited, the way that clothes are sometimes shown in clothing catalogues. The breasts are perfectly outlined and the dress falls to the ground as though there is a small figure inside. Rafferty astutely placed the above checklist on an evening gown-type dress. We inhabit clothing similarly to the ways in which we inhabit words. We know that fashion communicates, but Rafferty allows the stark pleasure of realizing again and again the ways in which consumer culture guides taste, preferences, the ways we feel about ourselves, and therefore the outside world. We can choose any combination from the list (confused, modern, moody?) or all of the above. Conversely, those terms are probably already projected onto the body inhabiting the clothing. Definitely women. Definitely those people in dresses.

In the gallery, Rafferty shows images of dresses and pages and screens; in the accompanying text, she makes visible her thought processes. Her Recommended Reading is simultaneously fashion catalogue and critique, process clue and question mark. There are two pages taken from Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), a paean to fashion and modernity. We see highlights and underlines (presumably Rafferty’s), including this passage describing “Woman” in the abstract:

[She] is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible.

Placed on the opposite page, over the text, within a yellow square matching the color of the highlighter, is an image of a young woman in a similarly yellow bikini, holding a piece of paper over her torso. The word “women” appears across her eyes, from the section entitled “Women and Prostitutes” from The Painter of Modern Life. Large text stamped beside her reads: ARE YOU OFFICE PRINTER READY?

The post Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s Dresses and Books at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

March 24 to May 1, 2016
143b Orchard Street (between Delancey and Rivington)
New York, 212 533 4670

In their two-person installation at Louis B. James Matthew and Katy Fischer have created pieces that evoke another time and place, one that does not and cannot exist. While Matthew’s paintings attempt to capture the complexity of an impossible environment in representation, Katy’s ceramics suggest a whole that is not real. These are works that aggregate, excavate, and re-collect the indifferent details of today and yesterday, and that also re-imagine them in a playful and inventive disorientation.

Functioning as vibrant windows, the bright, unadulterated colors of Matthew’s paintings are points of natural illumination in the austere whiteness of the gallery. In canvases suffused with swiftly applied swaths, atmosphere is communicated in simplicity. The linear division between two blocks of paint serves to illustrate a horizon and convey the sensorial saturation of a landscape. These abstract compositions are ambiguous cross-sections of the natural world in which our perspective is never made clear; viewers are left with the uncertainty of whether we are in it or on it, above it or below it. Nothing can be as it should, as you expect it, in a representation of landscape where the horizon is made vertical.

The artist exploits the spatial coding of found materials to disrupt the comfortable aloofness of the gallery space. Paris, 1907 (2015) engages viewers corporeally by pressing a chair seat, the place meant to hold a body, against the wall, as one’s actual, upright flesh exists as floor in relation to the chair’s legs. A painted canvas is suspended from the bottom limbs, presenting a slanting line between straw-yellow and a cool brown. A window onto a sloping hill? Turned earth? An abstract painting? Self (knowledge) and for Cathy (both 2016) provide a more generous contrast to the sense of inversion created by Paris, 1907, opening onto the viewer in a way that evokes action; spines of books prompt one to read, a mirror presents the opportunity to view the work and the gallery from a position otherwise impossible. Altogether, these painted structures are simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, engaging a viewer’s physical presence while subtly dominating the gallery’s limited space. Rather than existing as an oppressive force, however, these sculptural works present fragmented images, flattened awkwardly into a confusion of fleeting sensations and orientations.

While Matthew’s paintings recode the gallery in relation to a viewer’s body, Katy’s ceramics discourage interaction. Although painstaking in their idiosyncrasy and handmade precision, these miniature works resist the viewer’s temptation to slip them easily into a pocket or to handle them absentmindedly between thumb and forefinger. The components of the Shards (2016) series demand care and attention for their own preservation but also for yours; implications of intimacy are interrupted by fine points and rigid forms. Arranged in systems that are suggestive of an order that is not revealed, these various pieces come together as a puzzle that lacks direct correspondence.

Katy’s ceramic compositions layer the unexceptional relics of daily life with the overbearing operations of exhibition.The fragments, some recognizable, others invented, are a confusion of scale in which figures reminiscent of a miniature traffic cone and a scaled-down scythe are placed beside those of a solitary die, a fishing hook and a screw. In spite of their familiarity, these recognizable pieces are given no pride of place above the unrecognizable geometric slivers and chips that cluster in the spaces between. These ceramic objects adhere to the logics of sea glass and arrowheads, serving a purpose that has since been forgotten or made obsolete. Presented in rows on pedestals or on a wood-and-Plexi vitrine — in manners particular to museums with their attendant overtones of classification and determination — the ceramic components seek to preserve that which is not precious. There is a certain illogic to creating objects that are never meant to be complete, especially ones such as these that seem to memorialize the litter of contemporary urban spaces in a medium that could endure for centuries.

In both bodies, the mode of presentation comes as a point of rupture rather than stability in the relationship between the works and the space that they occupy. In suggestive symbolism and their rootedness elsewhere, these ceramics and paintings fit uncomfortably in the gallery, drawing attention to the unreality and emptiness of such a space. In the awkwardness of their occupation, these works provide the viewer with an escape route into the impossible space that they themselves are dreaming of.

The post “Inventive Disorientation”: Katy and Matthew Fischer at Louis B. James appeared first on artcritical.

June 7 to September 27, 2015
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at South Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, 323 857 6000

California is a great place to incubate, lending itself to a slower pace where its more contemplative residents may think and create amid beautiful landscape and sunshine, Noah Purifoy spent the last 15 years of his life creating sculptures and installations in the desert around Joshua Tree, California. His body of work, namely assemblage of locally found objects, offers a unique Mojave Desert experience that is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The title of the show, “Junk Dada,” serves as an insight to Purifoy’s work as it finds aesthetic, contextual relatives to artists who were known for turning menial objects/readymades into profound statements, while simultaneously referring to the homophonous “junk data.” His assemblage The Last Supper II (1989), for instance, consists of old, rusted silverware and sardine cans arranged neatly in a frame. The title and earth tone composition transforms the pieces of refuse into something meaningful, or possibly holy. Like a still life, each component of once-used material is a unit of data that tells us something about being in a certain place and time, but also transcends its fractured nature to become something new and unified. Purifoy doesn’t simply repurpose objects; one can sense the history of the silverware and sardine cans the way old photographs and antiques are haunted. Because of this, there is something morbidly nostalgic, yet beautiful in using dead things to create. The meticulous arrangement of photos, pigments, a skull, and various objects in The Summer of 1965 (1996), for example, holds the tension of a mysterious spell, every object a vital component to its potency.

Walking through the exhibition, it is easy to imagine the home of many of the works: Joshua Tree is a vast and strange landscape where the eerie silence overwhelms. It takes someone with a strong intellect to thrive in such solitude and Purifoy’s work is a reflection of such an experience. There is a toughness in his creations, but there is also at times a lighthearted sense of humor. His piece Ode to Frank Gehry (1999) is as hokey as it is architectural. Perhaps it speaks to the complete and bittersweet nature of existence — that what constitutes its tragedy is also what makes it comic. It also says something about the power of imagination: Don Quixote’s windmills in the desert come to mind looking at this piece.

Purifoy created his own atlas of fetishes and imagery. Whether a given piece is a politically charged collage, a wooden sculpture, or a textile assemblage, they all point to something central in his work: his sense of humanity. The viewer feels the love of material and handiwork in Rags and Old Iron I & II (1989), through the decisive arrangement of beads and textiles, which compel us with a mystical simplicity. In three mixed-media paintings hung together — Picket Fence, Four Horsemen, and Crucifixion (all 1993) — black and gray cubes float together over a white, textured ground and form coarse, charming symbols. They hold the mystery of an ambiguous tarot card reading yet one senses that they are but honest renderings made form observation.

In an age of single-use materials and computer-fabricated objects, Noah Purifoy’s work holds relevance in that the spirit cannot be stripped from art — that making things with one’s own hands and cherishing the materials and process of creation will always be magical.

The post History in the Making: Noah Purifoy at LACMA appeared first on artcritical.

April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

The post The Way of the World: Three Iranian Artists at Callicoon appeared first on artcritical.

April 18 to June 6, 2015
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York, 212 999 7337

Turner Prize-winning painter Malcolm Morley is currently exhibiting a striking new body of paintings and installation works at the Sperone Westwater. An accompanying monograph has also been published by the gallery. Throughout his expansive 60-year career, Morley has deftly surfed between rigid art-world categorizations such as abstraction, Pop art, photorealism and Expressionism. Ignoring such strictures has allowed Morley to stay true to his subjects — most recently his fascination with military histories and vintage paper models of planes — and, in the process, reveal hints of his own life story and obsessions.

The artist’s fascination with war harkens back to his boyhood in London. During World War II enemy forces bombed his family’s home. The family hurriedly left the house that night, never to return and Morley was deeply affected by this tragedy. During my recent visit to his Long Island studio, he revealed that his last, most poignant memory of home was the distinct image of his newly painted model airplane left sitting on the windowsill of his bedroom.

In these recent works, Morley scripts his color-laden fighter planes, battleships, forts and cannons into raucous, nonsensical battle scenarios — combinations of events and timelines plausible only from a child’s point of view. His recurrent lexicon of war imagery, adapted from vintage toys and model kits, once again resurfaces here. They evince a subtle but important shift in technique, towards a more expressionist brush mark, a loosening of the underlying grid, and a distortion or abstraction of surface. Buttery, sensuous brushstrokes compete with more textural applications of paint. In Freighter with Primary Colors and B2 Bombers (2013), paint is applied as physically articulated marks, both dry-brush and juicy, in stippled applications. The textural elements indicate splashing waves and bombs dropping. Meanwhile, deftly modeled tones of blue and white create poetic transitions in the sky and clouds. The bands of color that make up the deck of the sea vessel are slab-like marks that create tension and physicality as abstraction, a merger of historical fact and pure artistic license. The B2 bombers in this painting are decorated with a variety of stripes and patterns borrowed from aircraft insignia used to guide pilots in recognizing allied aircraft and sea vessels more effectively in the era before advanced radar and radio technologies took over. In the painting Dakota,(2015) the carnivalesque battle engages military forces of historical implausibility. With exaggerated, child-like renderings, history hits the blender as a Viking ship, lighthouse, train and German fighter plane are orchestrated across a silky cobalt green expanse. Although he is depicting naturalistic imagery, Morley does so by magnifying the abstract nature of his materials and subjects.

A number of works in the show incorporate paper assemblage and mixed media installation. In The Searchers (2014) two hand-decorated model airplanes are physically affixed to the cloudy blue sky of the painting plane at oblique angles. Morley explains he attaches the planes as such “to create shadows.” In the largest and most ambitious work in the show, Napoleon Crossing the Alps with Cannon (2014), painting and sculptural components merge into a theatrical, diagrammatic installation. The artist renders Napoleon on horseback, his equestrian pose borrowed from the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. A paper-and-encaustic cannon, replete with a stack of cannonballs, occupies the floor space in front of the painting, the weaponry aimed directly at the portrait. They’re a commanding presence, seemingly attacking Napoleon’s portrait and the regal militarism for which it stands.

Twisting military fact with fiction, Morley’s illogical narratives can sometimes bewilder beyond patient observation. But the vintage model airplanes, now a primary component of his illusionist reliefs, expand our experience beyond the nostalgia of his biography into a critique of dominant culture’s obsession with militarism. More importantly, their presence on and around the painted image allows for a heightened experience of time and place, both real and imagined, by creating a theatrically staged experience of Morley’s underlying narrative.

The post Flying Aces: Malcolm Morely at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

June Leaf: Recent Works at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 23 to June 13, 2015
210 11th Avenue #601 (at West 25th Street)
New York, 212 691 6565

Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades at Alexander Gray Associates
April 2 to May 21, 2015
510 West 26^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

The human body is incumbent in the work of artists June Leaf and Joan Semmel, who are subjects of recent shows in Chelsea at Edward Thorp Gallery and Alexander Gray Associates, respectively. Walking into “June Leaf: Recent Works” feels like stumbling upon a secret. Leaf, who has been practicing since the late 1940s, has frequently likened her working process to dance, and something of her physical body indeed feels present in the objects and paintings.

Much of the work included here examines the act of creation. As making anything is an individual experience for each person, perhaps it is not surprising that Leaf’s work puts vulnerability on open display. You can feel it as soon as you walk into the gallery, and are faced with Woman Drawing Man (2014), a sculpture that sets the tone for the remainder of the show. A concave piece of sheet metal stands atop a second piece, forming a sort of proscenium. On the vertical, a painted, nude, male figure stands with his arms outstretched. Kneeling before him and clutching a paintbrush, a female figure, also nude, applies paint to his body. Unlike the two-dimensional man, the woman is a true body in space, made from scraps of sheet metal stitched together with wire. The naturalistic position of her body — one leg cocked back for support, the outstretched arm — conveys a powerful sense of surrender. Of course, a woman’s surrender before a man is uneasy, because it is always loaded with a more disquieting significance. That Leaf’s work is deliberately primitive adds to the sense that this gesture of female subjugation is a timeless quandary.

A meditation on this link between work and submission continues throughout the show. In Figure Running on the Seam (2014) Leaf has appropriated the skeleton of an old sewing machine stand, suspending a curled wire encased in mesh between the two vertical spindles. At the end of the wire is the eponymous figure, which looks as if she is not so much running as she is collapsed from exhaustion. Beside it hangs a canvas, Making #1 (2013-2014), which depicts the sculpture in an incomplete state. The colors consist mostly of muted browns and grays, except for an emanation of crimson that seems to drip from the table of the base into a shocking puddle at the center right of the canvas. It’s a physical manifestation of the blood that is involved, figuratively or metaphorically, with putting oneself fully into a piece of work. The object is made from the remnants of a machine traditionally relegated to a woman’s domain, and a sly, feminist subtext is once again at play here, as the viewer is asked to confront what it means to have a sagging body caught between its gears.

Elsewhere, Leaf grapples with work and the surrender of the body as it relates to the most private realms. In acrylic painted on tin, Woman Carrying Child Up the Stairs (2011) depicts the female figure ascending a staircase, with a child slumped over her shoulder in deep sleep, while in Turning Pages (2012-2015), done in the same medium, an abstracted couple is caught in the act of intercourse. The woman lays facedown, an arm and a leg trail off in quivery wakes of paint that melt into the background and she offers no struggle, while the male figure kneels atop and astride her body. Both paintings afford the viewer a voyeuristic perspective — as though we are peeping through a doorway undetected, spying upon these private moments between intimates and witnessing their momentarily exposed vulnerabilities. In her ability to lay bare these fraught moments of humanity, one is hard pressed to think of a braver artist that June Leaf.

As Leaf’s work is quiet, and slowly unfolds its meaning, Joan Semmel’s paintings are explicit and confrontational. “Across Five Decades,” her recent career survey at Alexander Gray Associates, made clear that Semmel more definitively embraced the tenets of second-wave feminism. However, like Leaf, Semmel has made a priority of the female body. As she has said of her work, “I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” This desire is unmistakable in her paintings from the 1970s, like the knockout Erotic Yellow (1973). In a vibrant palette of yellows, greens, and pinks, Semmel captures a nude and entwined couple in the middle of vigorous foreplay. Both of their faces are obscured by the man’s arm, and between his spread legs the woman has one hand clamped firmly beneath his balls.

This is especially pertinent in some of the later paintings, where the artist makes herself the subject. In Centered (2002) Semmel has rendered herself nude before a mirror, sitting in a relaxed pose with one arm curled casually around her bent knee, neither obviously flaunting nor hiding her middle-aged body. With her other hand, she holds a camera up to her eye; like in Erotic Yellow (and several other paintings in the show), the face is obscured. The obstruction of her face is not only arch however, but also emancipating. While she purports to an examination of the self, Semmel simultaneously subverts the viewer’s gaze by turning it back upon them with the use of the camera and mirror. The energy of Semmel’s work is triumphal and celebratory. Where Leaf plumbs feminine experience for its ambivalence, Semmel embraces its power.

June Leaf and Joan Semmel hail from a generation that was peculiar for female artists. Leaf, who was born in 1929 and Semmel, born three years later, came of age when work by women artists infrequently garnered attention, but who both nonetheless established steady working practices which saw them into the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and beyond. Is it too hopeful to believe that the work of these two veterans, who anticipated later twentieth century feminism, now entering the dialogue, is a harbinger of a shift away from that tired, long-established prejudice towards women’s art? For through their heightened sense of the corporeal, both Leaf and Semmel in different ways are unflinching in their ability to strip bare fragilities shared by all humankind. Looking at their work, we realize we have all been exposed.

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