Mary Boone Gallery
April 28 to July 29, 2016
745 Fifth Avenue (at 58th Street)
New York, 212 752 2929

Callicoon Fine Arts
April 28 to July 29, 2016
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

“Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.”

-William Bradford Of Plimoth Plantation (ca 1630–51)

It’s a wild mind that riffs off a 17th-century devotional/historical text as source material for a contemporary painting exhibition. But as a road map to its thought-corridors, the vintage Pilgrim images that appear collaged onto Mayflower Now (2015) and Coin (2015) are a key to understanding the questing journey of Sadie Benning’s pilgrim soul, recently on view in twin exhibitions at Callicoon Fine Arts and Mary Boone Gallery. That these large, visually seductive, and lushly colored works are freighted with pointed critiques of organized religion, among other concerns, only ups Benning’s philosophical ante. And if a reductive vocabulary of pictographs and collaged islands of glistening color are the bullets in his magazine, the approach is clear — simpler is better when you want to hit the target.

Benning’s ripped-from-the-headlines commentary on the North Carolina transgender bathroom-access debate hews particularly close to home; he transitioned from female to male in recent years. In the show’s signal image, The Crucifixion (2015), on view at Callicoon, he lays out his precis: a nearly seven-foot-tall, Prussian blue, skirt-wearing female figure is nailed to a black cross, on a blood-red background. The figure has small breasts and a jutting form below the waist that can be read as either a baby-bump or a steatopygous rump. But it is the disproportionately large, and plainly phallic head that serves to deliver the message here: we are all in North Carolina. The figure as a whole also cites the gender-indicating pictographs on public restroom doors.

Not all of the works in these shows telegraph their politics, though an abstract work like Nature (2015) seems to witness the aftermath of a hunt. Worm God (2015) is another abstraction, its palette, form and technique suggestive of Matisse’s cut-outs. Benning assembles these works by mixing acrylic paint with resin or a milk-based casein, applying it to canvas, then cutting out shapes to be collaged. As such, there’s precious little painting qua painting, with nary a brushstroke in evidence.

Worm God is displayed along with six other God-paintings, all along a line on one wall at Mary Boone, to form what serves for a frieze. Though they are separate works, there is a thematic harmony, which lends a cinematic storyboard effect to their cheek-by-jowl placement. Grey God (2015) works off a gravestone-rubbing vibe, but shares with the two Green God paintings (both 2015) at Callicoon the pictorial design of a child’s clown painting.

Benning is clearly not shy about mixing styles; the monochrome Guts (2015) looks back to an earlier series that first caught this observer’s attention at Callicoon’s booth at the 2014 NADA New York art fair. And The Owl and the King (2015), which dominates one wall at Mary Boone, is one of his most photo-dominated collage-paintings. It also provides a backdrop for his curious inclusion of three-dimensional pagan god statuettes, the type you might find at a flea-market, which sit atop small shelves on the surfaces of this and several of the other paintings. The Owl And The King might also be an homage to Mike Kelley, with its front-and-center image of a neglected Muppet doll splayed Death of Marat-like atop a discarded cardboard shipping box.

Several of the works represent an indulgence in Pop art; The Boxer (2015), Priest (2016) and Fruits (2015) are the least successful works among these groupings of different stylistic approaches, especially with Priest, where the juxtaposition of a photograph of a priest with a statuette of a pagan god is simply too pat, too illustrative.

The continuing presence of filmic images, whether sourced from found newspaper photos or from what appear to be family snapshots, is a historical thread that runs through Benning’s family history to his earliest art world forays. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1973. Benning’s father James is a maker of independent art films and a longtime CalArts professor. At 19, he was given a show of memorably crude but arrestingly compelling video works at the Museum of Modern Art. A year later he was selected for inclusion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Still, Benning’s pilgrim journey from downtown darling to selling out an uptown solo show at blue-chip Mary Boone (and also at his primary gallery, Callicoon) has taken 20 years. So the hot today/gone tomorrow syndrome will definitely not apply here. And given the broadly diverse range of his practice — video, painting, multi-media works — we’ll likely be enjoying many new facets of Sadie Benning for decades to come.

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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.

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