Mark Greenwold: And Now What?!

May 30 to July 12, 2019
545 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, garthgreenan.com

Melodramatic and unhinged though they may at first appear, Mark Greenwold’s paintings frequently depict sexual and violent acts without actually being erotic or horrifying. Teasing the boundary between attraction and repulsion, his works are a litmus test of what you value in art. But if you allow yourself to be distracted by the grotesquery on display in this exhibition, And Now What?!, you might miss an important new direction his work has taken.

His often-naked figures are depicted with a fanatical photographic facticity that emphasizes the imperfect, aging, human body, if anything in a way that makes them even more abject than they might be in actuality. The women are often topless while Greenwold depicts himself, when not nude, clad in a negligee, or dead. It used to be not uncommon to see an ex-wife’s head grafted on a dog’s body, and seemingly none too happy about it, with the dog half getting better treatment. Most of the figures are friends and family, and though it is normally a proud distinction to be depicted in a work of art, in Greenwold’s case, be careful what you wish for.

A Magic Summer, (2017) depicts the well-known artist, James Siena, twice, once wielding a cleaver, and again prostrate in green underpants being stabbed in the heart with long pointed scissors by his topless wife, Katia Santibañez. But those are only three of the seven figures occupying a cramped seaside room, or nine if you include the dog and the disembodied head of Chuck Close floating at the window.

But something else seems to be going on at Greenan. Ostensibly presented as a mini-retrospective, this show really serves to demonstrate how the roots of Greenwold’s most recent paintings can be seen in the radical paintings he was doing while he was just in his early 20s. The four here are a revelation. They are all large (around four by five feet), energetically painted in acrylic, and though packed with figures, animals, and insects, and employing windows to exterior spaces, everything seems invented rather than sourced from photos. Christmas Painting, (1964), The Car & the Bed,” (1964), and Untitled (Lady Bug/Batman), (1965), all employ flat, colored (often brick red) planes to give the paintings the spatial flatness of Matisse’s 1911 Red Studio. Done in the mid 1960s, they were not very hip at a time when minimalist monochrome reigned but seem daring and original today. Though the talented 22-year-old Greenwold was clearly influenced by Francis Bacon, both existentially and stylistically, these paintings have a crazy energy all their own. By 1966-7, in Barbara (Grasshopper), a complexity of pattern and design, with areas requiring meticulous rendering, had already started to dominate. Then four years later, he shifted into more direct photo representational territory.

It is easy to trace the bulk of Greenwold’s mature paintings as deriving from two large works shown here that he did in his 30s: Spanish Mediterranean Bedroom, (1971), and Bright Promise (for Simon), (1971–1975). They both have scrupulously detailed, class-conscious interiors whose figures seem to be collaged into the painting space in a way that reveals the influence of Photorealism, the dominant, au courant representational mode of the early ‘70s. The obvious contrivance of the collaged space can be attributed at once to modernist privileging of artifice and a young painter’s inexperience with constructing congruent space from unrelated photographic sources. Greenwold’s figures in later paintings, while still having an obvious collage construction, are more seamlessly integrated into the space of the paintings even when wildly out of scale with one another.

But several years ago, incongruous clouds of randomly colored wacky biomorphic shapes began to appear above the heads of the people in his paintings. Initially it was hard to tell Greenwold’s purpose other than to introduce an element of abstraction, with the effect of creating unintelligible thought balloons that could further fuck with a viewer’s attempts at comprehension. After seeming to have been subsequently abandoned, recently these areas have reappeared and metastasized into full-blown expressionist tumors across the surface of the paintings. They signal a major evolutionary change in Greenwold’s purpose.

Up until now, mostly what occurs in Greenwold’s mature paintings have been depictions, and the purpose of his finicky small marks has been to render a vivid description of real surfaces and create interiors with furniture, objects, people, and animals that have a smirking sarcastic presence. But suddenly Greenwold uses these strokes to disintegrate objects and people and make the figures and their relationships even more ambiguous. And while writers lately have seen in the mottled, wrinkled, and flaccid flesh of Greenwold’s photorealistic characters a heroic confrontation with aging and death, this new approach is a philosophical shift, an infectious disintegration that doesn’t depict feeling but enacts it. Distasteful rendering of aging and death can be dismissed with an “ugh.” And though a scrupulously delineated surface can pull one in, it can also be tiring to contemplate all that labor. But the surfaces of these new paintings, such as Diaper, (2017) for instance, or Pink Bedroom, (2018) where the brushstrokes have started to come unmoored from their depictions, are energized with possibility. Images lose definition and force viewers to come to grips with the anxious loss of control of their own hermeneutic abilities. As the internal formal gyroscopes of the paintings break down, they hark back to Greenwold in his 20s, with their disrupted surfaces and invented figures.

Diaper, the most unnerving of his recent paintings, seems painted with wild abandon. The ghost of Picasso in his tighty whities, macho posing with his dog, mockingly haunts this painting. The main figure, recognizable as the artist himself, clad only in a yellow-stained adult diaper and knee brace, raises his hands in horror, his mouth open in a howl that would unnerve Munch. Even though he manages to delineate every yellowed tooth, we are easily distracted by his connection to a urine-filled catheter bag lying like a dead fish on a coffee table. Meanwhile, a dog is happily panting behind to the right, which is just below a man hung naked from the ceiling whose bulging eyes ogle a nude woman crouched ass-backwards on a chair below right. With a body that gives new meaning to the term contrapposto, her face has exploded into a cubist pile of expressionist brush strokes, though we can make out eyes, nose, open mouth, and ear, as well her two breasts that have also entered the cubist scrum. There also seems to be a little flying penis squirting cum into her mouth, a detail that requires close attention. Though the small object-packed interiors of his other paintings can seem (intentionally) claustrophobic, air wafts easily through these open brushstrokes affording room for chairs, tables, lamps, fireplace, mirror, and portrait hanging on the wall without feeling confining. A duck head also pops out of a metal vase in the foreground, and a partially formed disembodied head seems about to materialize in the air next to the hanged man.

The angst-ridden, post-adolescent confrontation, in the paint itself, with impending adulthood of Greenwold in his 20s has re-emerged in his late 70s as an emotionally comparable confrontation, with impending old age, disintegration, and death. Insanity in painting is a freedom of sorts, a letting go of one’s conventional attitudes, even if those attitudes might seem unconventional to everyone else. Beneath Greenwold’s work has lurked a secret hopeless desire to be accepted by a culture whose values he categorically rejects. That dynamic has played out using deliberately outrageous subject matter, softened by a studiously labor-intensive execution. But in art, as often in life, letting go of all calculation, even if already an outlier, often leads to becoming a true culture hero. In his latest paintings Greenwold is achieving the precise depth of emotion he has often only depicted—yielding to feeling, he is starting to lose his mind.

The post Careful What You Wish For: Mark Greenwold at Garth Greenan appeared first on artcritical.

Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

The post Killer Opening For “Murdering The World,” Mark Greenwold’s Long-Awaited Debut at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

A young, buoyant crowd, enlivened by the day’s nonstop art crush, landed on West 53rd Street to let loose at The Armory after-party to benefit The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

A VIEW FROM A BRIDGE

BACKED BY MOMA DONORS

PERFECT CRANIUM

THREE MUSES

MUSTACHIOED CONNECTION

HEARTTHROB TROUBADOUR

THE BEARDS HAVE IT

THAT’S MONEY

KEEPIN’ IT REAL

NECKLINES AND BYLINES

WHIRLING DERVISH

A TENDER GOODNIGHT

TO OBLIVION – AND BEYOND

The post MoMA’s After-Party for The Armory Show: A photo journal appeared first on artcritical.

At the young old age of 69, Chuck Close has become as much an icon as one of his signature portraits.  Along with numerous awards he has, according to the very helpful biography given out by the gallery, received no less than 10 Honorary Doctorates.  An insightful catalogue essay by Lilly Wei that accompanies the exhibition reminds readers that Close achieved his icon status by grabbing our attention in 1967 with his Big Nude and Big Self Portrait and then holding it with nary a letup for the next four decades.  Put another way, in very short order Close moved beyond being a painter representing a movement, or of his time, and in that singular way achieved by so few artists, became an artist whose work is primarily referential to him alone.  Individual specifics aside, Chuck Close, we all know, makes Chuck Close paintings.  Not a bad trick, as they say.

Herein lies a potential problem, however, for once we all know something, we all have a tendency to stop looking.  How easy to walk briskly through this current exhibition and dismiss it with a blasé “more of the same”.   And yes, it’s true, another show of large portraits including more self portraits, more of his long term artist/celebrity subjects (Phillip Glass, Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano), and one or two newer faces including, somewhat unexpectedly, Bill Clinton.  The main room has 7 of the familiar large scale paintings, while the side room displays 9 equally large jacquard tapestries.  A couple of artist’s 24” x 20” Polaroid “maquettes” hang in the entryway to round things out.

The impulse to take Close for granted is perhaps all the greater because the work has an effortless assurance to it – the irony of the artist’s being a nearly complete quadriplegic notwithstanding.  We must slow down, look past the facility, past the celebrity, to find the real investigation still taking place.  Take, for instance, Georgia, a painting dated 2006-2007, which is 108 ½ inches high by 84 inches wide.  It is subdivided with a grid of squares 43 high and 34 across, making each square roughly 2 ¾ inches high and wide.  Each square, in turn, has about 6 colors comprising a miniature target.  Add it up: 34 x 43 x 6 = 8,772 individual decisions about color in this one painting.  Now, the point here is not that that is an exceptional number of decisions to make in a painting.  In fact it is likely to be fewer than would be found in any number of paintings, especially figurative works.  No, the point is that Close lays every single color choice out right in front of the viewer.  He breaks it all down for us; nothing is hidden, everything is revealed.

Which leads to another question: if the artist wishes to show all, why is it that his painted subjects are obfuscated behind an undulating grid of fluid concentric circles?  Perhaps the answer is because for Close the real subject is not the people, as fascinating as they might be, or the paint, as luscious as it is, or any aspect at all from the legion of technical processes he seems to master with ease.  Close’s true subject is to de-construct, and re-construct, the act of seeing. A difficult task as we are hardwired to believe that seeing is a simple act and not, as Close points out, mutable, porous, and extremely elastic.

So Close attacks from different flanks: the mystery of the focal plane in his photographs and daguerreotypes; how a myriad of colors can underlie a black and white image in the jacquard tapestries; and the nature of recognition in the paintings.  Each an object lesson on the true nature of visual understanding.  And what about those paintings, have the portraits really disappeared behind the paint?  Actually not, for if the viewer will squint, just a bit, at the image they will see all the circles and dots merge together into a striking likeness; another sublime slight of hand courtesy of Chuck Close.

The post Chuck Close: Paintings and Tapestries from 2005-2009 at PaceWildenstein appeared first on artcritical.

Whatever it says in “The Wasteland,” from an art critic’s point of view, August is the cruelest month. Even the lingering group shows, the staple summer fare, peter out in the weeks before Labor Day. After Labor Day, la deluge, but when New York newspapers that usually don’t venture north of 90th Street start to run features on the museum scene in Massachusetts, the drought has reached red alert status.

To my relief, then (or is it a further sign of desperation?), the cover of W, the seriously outsize if only slightly offbeat fashion glossy, beckoned from a shelf on the cornerstore the other day. “The

Triumphant Return of a Superstar” announced a 40-page portfolio of Kate Moss by a roster of artists and fashion photographers. The first few names happen to be three, to my mind, of the world’s most serious painters of the human form: Chuck Close, Lucian Freud, and Alex Katz. I may be philistine enough to prefer the blonde beast modeling Victoria’s Secret in the advertisements, but men at the forefront of contemporary taste, it transpires, are confirmed Kateophiles.

And for some reason, men it is: W thought only to enlist two women in their line-up. Lisa Yuskavage photographs Ms. Moss kneeling on a sheepskin rug, naked but for bead panties (familiar from her recent painting show at Marianne Boesky) and stripey socks. Ms. Moss touches herself suggestively while coyly holding a fine porcelain cup and saucer in her other hand. While the model once dubbed “super waif” has filled out in her dotage (she is pushing 30), she is still incongruously un-Yuskavageish in body type. Only her snub nose is reminiscent of the iconoclastic painter’s warped aesthetics.

The other female perspective comes from Inez van Lamsweerde, who is half of a creative duo with Vinoodh Matadin; they are also among nine photographers responsible for the variant Kate Moss covers of the September issue. Variance, it seems, is the essence of Ms. Moss’s appeal. The nine covers could be as many models, testifying to an almost feline malleability.

Ms. Moss was a rule breaker in a profession dominated by “ball-breakers.” At a time of culturally diverse Amazons (leader of the pack was the half-Danish, half-Peruvian Helena Christensen) along came a pale, wan 5′ 7″ girl-nextdoor type from a south of London suburb.True, mixed in with her Anglo-Saxon ubiquity is a trace of something Asiatic – high cheekbones and pointy eyes suggest a splash of Tartar – but as Alex Katz, who was a confirmed fan before his invitation from W arrived, put it: “She’s completely ordinary. That’s what makes her extraordinary.”

Ms. Moss is a natural for Mr. Katz, as the realist master chooses sitters that are often at once quirky and glamorous. He usually casts downtown friends in his bohemian fêtes champetres, but he is no stranger to high style: he once painted Catherine Deneuve and has created a modern American icon out of his wife, Ada.

W follows in the footsteps of British Vogue, which in May 2000 ran an homage to Kate by seven “Young British Artists” (as the nation’s It-generation of neo-conceptualists have been dubbed), including the Chapman brothers,one of whom was linked romantically to the model. The spread said as much about the intellectual aspirations of the YBAs as it did of their muse’s. One painter of this generation, Gary Hume, had already immortalized Ms. Moss in a nearabstract portrait that dealt poignantly with the impossible challenge – at least to painting as practiced by Mr. Hume – of finding some equivalent to the aura of a supermodel. (And how clichéd “immortalized” now seems in relation to a visage mechanically reproduced many millions of times.)

An American counterpart to the YBAs is the conceptualist-abjectionist Tom Sachs. For W, he has created a squalid logo-lowlife scenario in which Ms. Moss stars as the attendant of a rather scruffy, improvised, mobile McDonald’s. Mr. Sachs has built his career out of politically excessive vilifications of corporate identity. For the Jewish Museum’s notorious self-hate fest last year, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” Mr. Sachs casually collided Prada and Tiffany packaging with Holocaust accoutrements. (Memo from an art lover to the multinationals: Please sue and put this prankster out of business!)

On the subject of McDonald’s, it looks as if Ms. Moss was put on a diet of cheeseburgers and Mars bars especially for her meeting with Chuck Close. The cruel coldness of his lens, with its overload of dermatological data, shatters illusions of natural beauty – unless my own prejudice merely reveals the extent to which airbrush-happy photo-editors have corrupted taste. Recall how the French actress Emmanuelle Béart lost her contract with Dior after appearing at a human rights demo sans make-up (and looking gorgeous!), and it could be argued that Mr. Close is a better advocate for cosmetics., His singularly unflattering images of Ms. Moss get right up to the raw facts that linger beneath the false surfaces generated by the beauty industry. He has given Ms. Moss a kind of defiant white trash beauty that recalls Dorothea Lange’s classic depictions of impoverished migrants.

It might seem incongruous for Kate Moss to end up in a Freud painting: His aesthetic, so redolent of the miserabilist, earnest, existentialist postwar period in which he came artistically of age, seems a far cry from the slick, trashy, ephemeral pop culture epitomized by the cult of celebrity models. But Mr.Freud is ever the slumming lord of high art, socializing with teenagers and all the while vying with the old masters. He now exhibits in London at the trendy gallery that represents the young turks who had already adopted Ms. Moss as their muse.

Unlike fellow model Jerry Hall, who also once sat for Mr. Freud, Ms. Moss kept her appointments, collaborating in what looks (I haven’t seen the picture “in the flesh”) to be a strong and accomplished work. Telegraph critic Martin Gayford reported that the sitter’s pregnancy had hurried Mr. Freud along: Notoriously, his paintings can take dozens, if not hundreds, of sittings. The result in this case is untypically smooth brushstrokes. A suitably model-like serenity of surface contrasts with the zitsy Chuck Close daguerreotypes and Mr. Freud’s own often tortuously blotchy impasto. But, as in Alex Katz’s image in this portfolio, the model has been stripped of her defining individuality to conform with the painter’s visions, needs, interests. Which is fair enough – that’s her job.

The post Kate Moss appeared first on artcritical.