August 9 to September 16, 2018
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

Gertrude Abercrombie (Karma Books, New York, 2018). Essays by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzolino and Dinah Livingston, and an interview by Studs Terkel

When I was little and couldn’t sleep, my mother would tell me to close my eyes and imagine meeting her in Dreamland. Over the years this made up place achieved a fully outlined map: Lemonade Lake was my preferred meeting place with Mom. The pictorial world of Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) feels, to me, like a warped version of my own Dreamland. Her dark palette, cloudy skies, mysterious shadows, and (my personal favorite) ladders leading to the moon are mystical and, indeed, dreamy, though with the exhilarating potential to turn more sinister. On view in New York for the first time in more than 60 years, Karma Gallery’s selection of 70 portraits, still lifes, and landscapes celebrates the work of the woman who famously, and with some justification, dubbed herself the “Queen of Chicago.”

The daughter of opera singers, Abercrombie lived most of her life in Chicago’s bohemian quarter, Hyde Park, where she became a central figure in the social scene. A  jazz lover and herself a very capable musician, she was close friends with Dizzy Gillespie: There is a touching photograph of the two hugging reproduced in Karma’s gorgeous 400-plus page publication accompanying the exhibition. Her large South Side home was always brimful of creative luminaries, and in dubbing herself the “other Gertrude” she saw herself as Chicago’s Gertrude Stein. Within such a dazzling social circle, it is no wonder that Abercrombie’s interior life – her inspiration – would be as riveting. Thinking of herself as rather witchy (even labeling herself a “good witch” to a group of interested children, as recounted to Studs Terkel in the interview from 1977 published in the book), Abercrombie had a mystical way about her, which comes across  in her paintings. Recurring motifs include black cats, haunted-looking women (often herself), shells, moons, and doors. While painted with care, her work always seems a bit misty, ready to be the setting of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, or voiced-over with “It was a dark and stormy night…”

The show moves chronologically and clockwise through Karma’s two luminous and spacious rooms, opening with the tiny Untitled (Slaughterhouse at Aledo) (1934), and closing with a signature example of her door series, The Door and the Rock (1971). Abercrombie’s subject matter remains consistent throughout her oeuvre, but the variation of composition and her impeccable ability to create an immersive mood even from small objects (paintings here range from one inch square to three feet on the longest side) nonetheless create a dynamic exhibition. With its down-the-rabbit-hole effect, it is very easy to lose track of time in this exhibition.

Ever the jazz aficionado, Abercrombie thought of herself as a “Bop” painter. This style is evident in her 1945 painting Untitled (Blue Screen, Black Cat, Print of Same). Sedate in her typical blue-grey palette, the painting exudes improvisational whimsy. As the title implies, the painting is of a room with a cat half behind a blue screen, and a picture on the wall of the same room – the blue screen, green floor, and little black cat, but sneakily without anything on its miniaturized wall. This rhythmic variation feels like a solo spot: adding distinctive flare to a still-recognizable standard.

Abercrombie once said that she didn’t think of herself as a good painter, but as a good artist. I believe that her artistry came from her storytelling ability. Though she did have a rather naїve painterly style, this forefronted the composite image rather than drawing attention to the intricacies of a delicate technique. Her paintings adopt the language of the music she loved: carefully constructed compositions like twisting and folding melodies; colors like the key signature that sets the tone; textures like a little vibrato at the end of a phrase. Individually the parts don’t make a lot of sense, but together the piece works.

Reverie (1947) exemplified this unique storytelling, and my experience with this painting characterized the show for me. While it was easy to pick out the Abercrombie stamp, here her motif of the bare tree, the more I looked, the more mysterious the piece became. This is odd, as one would think that the more time you spend with an object the more you can grasp it. But I was excited to find so many works in this show that instead seemed to change the more I stared at them. In Reverie, I noticed how the woman’s lounging pose mimicked the languor of the blackened tree branches, the way they both pointed to the strange brick structure in the distance. With no doors, no windows, what is it? I saw the water in the background, the patch of ground illuminated by a pink-tinged moon. I was riveted by a white shape on the ground: a handkerchief? A sheet of paper? The enigmatic scene is an intellectual challenge while remaining captivating in its surreal quality. I could imagine one of Abercrombie’s owls outside the scope of the frame hooting softly, or a line of melody from Miles Davis drifting in.

In an illuminating essay, Susan Weininger quotes Abercrombie on dreams and Surrealism: “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but I don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed… Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All the foolishness has been taken out.” Although the imagery and intentional anachronism in Abercrombie conjures a plethora of associations with such Surrealists as Max Ernst, René Magritte, or early work by Giorgio de Chirico, one is as likely to think of fellow women artists as these canonical males. Besides such obvious candidates as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, Honoré Sharrer, another Surrealist, came to mind: Her motifs of birds and use of jewel tones invert Abercrombie’s somber style. As does the contemporary video work, BRIGIT (2016), by Turner Prize nominee Charlotte Prodger, in conjunction with Abercrombie’s radiantly blue depiction of a veiled St. Brigit from 1963.

Abercrombie’s witchery conjures such sisterhood, feeding this viewer’s appetite for narrative imagery from powerful ladies (full disclosure, I’m a student at Smith College.) I wonder, also,   how the context of #MeToo is going to impact the rediscovery of the Queen of Chicago. Indeed the show did feel particularly prescient, and I wondered what this powerful woman would think about the political timing of her renaissance.

The final piece of the show wrapped everything up nicely – by which I mean it left many lingering questions. The placement of The Door and the Rock (1971) has a symbolism worthy of  Abercrombie herself. This modestly sized painting – not even a foot square – of a cracked rock sitting in turquoise water, near a red-orange door resting on the water, or perhaps connected to a wall that blends in to the charcoal sky, accompanies the viewer upon exiting the gallery, leaving me to wonder: Does the door in the painting lead to the watery world pictured, or is it a portal to some other fantastic psychological dreamland?

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May 31 to June 30, 2018
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, lesleyheller.com

Have you ever wanted to walk inside a painting, sit down and experience the work from the inside? Ship and Dock/Nights and Days or The Gazer is like a painting: you have to keep looking at what is before you so you know not only what you’re seeing but what you’re feeling as well. This mixed media assemblage, the primary work in this exhibition, takes up an entire room and carries psychological power.

Entering a darkened space through a floor-to-ceiling black curtain, you encounter a structure beyond which, in one direction, is a slowly, gradually changing sky beginning at the horizon line. The whole installation is miniaturized yet human-scale, like a great big, exploded-open Joseph Cornell box.

A bench is placed conveniently against a dark wall pierced with scattered holes that allow tiny and tinier lights to shine through. Sit down with the starry wall behind you and gaze at, and through, the structure. It’s mesmerizing and invites you to linger and contemplate the passage of time. The structure and the walls on either side and behind are dark with a greater depth than any empty black because this color is, in fact, a dark marine blue.

The structure is a dock with two sheds. One weather beaten shed, nearer the viewer, to the left on the dock, is clad in corrugated metal with authentic signs of aging: dings and scrapes. Its door has a weathered, cross-hatched safety-glass window through which a lit bulb exudes orangey-yellowish light with a brighter center, like the glow from a gas lamp, only the filament identifies this lamp as an industrial-type, if delicate electrical bulb. On entering the space with its many parts, darkness and this light, this lamp suggests a Bec Auer gas lamp of the type familiar from Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés. We look through something to see a view beyond, a light on the other side of the solid structure. Only there is no figure here except oneself and a haunting feeling of loneliness. Like Duchamp, Donna Dennis has controlled the conditions under which the viewer experiences the work. One must be part of the work to see it.

The piece changes, even though nothing moves but light. This is not a static sculpture. There is a subtle though constant state of change, augmented by the gentle sounds of water lapping up on a shore, swirls and eddies, droplets of water, tidal sounds. Waves pull back, rigging that is not tied fast quietly clatters, breezes funnel through the dock and over water. There’s an eerie cosmic whoosh that complements the surrounding darkness.

The other shed, further from the viewer and to the far right at the end of a walkway, stands on an elevated structure with a dark side facing the viewer and a light side facing left. This light side lends a surreal quality to the scene. The gravity and sharp contrasts of light and dark on the sides of this form suggest the melancholy of Giorgio de Chirico’s abandoned cityscapes and the relationships he creates between buildings in space.

The dock is set on what look like concrete pylons whose square footings suggest water underneath. The viewer may be walking on that water. The crossbeams, the gangplank and stairways ck create many geometric shapes, like erector sets or metal shelving: crisscrossing patterns and a variety of exes and rectangular framing. Drooping cables or fuel pipes connect into stanchions that resemble plumbing fixtures, rounded at the top, as if they have shut-off valves or switches for the flow of liquids or current running inside the sheathing. Or they are hawsers, , protected from the elements inside metal tubing where those strong cables penetrate the deck.

This is a durational work because beyond the dock the projection of sky above the horizon changes gradually from day to night to day, from painterly sky blues to dark night with brushstroked stars as a ship changes from white against the night sky to black against the daytime skies in the distance. Thus the elements of engineering and technology that exist here in a three-dimensional space, also includes the fourth dimension of time. And, though that horizon changes, it’s always night for the viewer with the stars shining behind us..

This scene may represent a vast lake in northern Minnesota where typically fish houses and small cabin structures can be seen from the shore. The scale of the work suggests that this may represent one of the Great Lakes because the ship, an ore ship carrying coal, is so small, so far in the distance. And what looks like a heap of rubble under the dock suggests piled up coal

The viewer is struck by the precision Donna Dennis employed in creating the overall construction, the sound and the lighting. This reflects the attention brought to bear on the locations where the artist made her beautiful gouache drawings that hang in a separate room, and the elaborate preparations to accomplish her installation, first constructed in the studio, then disassembled and recreated at Lesley Heller.

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Dennis Kardon is the legitimate heir of all the renegade traditions of modern painting, from the bastardized pittura metafisica of late de Chirico through Picabia at his most transgressive to the “classic” “Bad” painters of the 1980s. The Midas of perversity, whatever his brush touches turns to ickiness. The ambivalent orb in the forefront of “Anticipating Disaster” redefines the notion of the “anxious object”: a globe that somehow sprouts vaginal wings out of its melting icecap. Elsewhere in this decomposing composition is a shape wrapped in a crinkly silver foil that hints at a joint of meat you don’t want to unwrap. The chance encounter of this unhappy couple takes place within a still life setting that could read equally as a tabletop or an eerie architectural space of indefinable scale. Kardon is a master of ill ease.

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English-born artist Rupert Goldsworthy has followed an eclectic path over the past two decades. Living mostly in Berlin or — as at present — New York, he’s spread his energies across writing, researching and curating, as well as his own art, and has run project spaces in both cities. There are clear continuities across all those activities, though: the history of political activism and AIDS; an interest in how different communities interrelate; and an ongoing investigation into how images are reused and what they stand for. His book, CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof (2010), for example, traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. His last exhibition at Ritter/Zamet, in 2012, used image sources as diverse as medicine packaging, stickers from street art, and his own photographs of signs and monuments to juxtapose the old and new communities in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

Everything in Goldsworthy’s current show was made onsite during a month’s residency at the gallery. The floor dominates: it was undisguisedly hand-painted with typically North African tile-like patterns. Combined with the natural light filtering through the small gallery’s roof, Mosque Floor generates the atmosphere of a courtyard and makes for an environment that — true to his interdisciplinary form — provides the platform for events with guest artists, musicians and writers.

The images around the courtyard are predictably varied. The most striking and conventionally painted is Clone Moustache, a looming close-up of part of a face with bushy hair completely covering the mouth. That suggests secrecy or a failure of communication, as well as membership of the 1970’s Castro-clone scene, a culture driven by extreme promiscuity. Both aspects fit the text paintings Mineshaft Dress Code and The Coleherne, which adopt a painterly photographic halftone dot format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s, to depict a crowd outside a notorious 1970s London leather club. The text is a word-for-word enamel reproduction of the club’s amateurishly hand-written dress code notice, which Goldsworthy has blown up to the scale of a man’s body. New York’s Mineshaft was among the first sex clubs to be closed by the city during the AIDS crisis, and according to Goldsworthy, its dress rules were well known in gay lore. The list is fascinating, featuring as it does both what can be worn (biker leathers, western gear, uniforms) and what can’t (suits, rugby shirts, disco drag and, surprisingly, cologne or perfume).

If those three paintings suggest nostalgia for the pre-AIDS freedoms of the ‘70s, albeit tinged by what came later, then Anita and Brian takes us back a little further: in a red and black graphic style that imitates a printing process, we see Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones in Nazi uniforms. That puts us in 1969, just before Jones was found dead in

his swimming pool. Finally, Bull appropriates an early 20th century cartoon about the plight of Armenians, then adds a painterly splatter of bloody color. Several copiously moustached men strive to push a bull off a cliff: impending disaster is now visibly present.

The overall effect is more allusive than systematic, but we might think not just about AIDS, but more generally about how one culture imitates or opposes another, or how visual representations help form cultural identities, or whether the various patterns of collapse referenced — not just the end of the pre-AIDS sex scenes, but the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey, the fall of the Third Reich, and the endpoint of Western colonialism suggested by the floor’s expansion of Islamic influence — have any commonalities.

All that makes for a fascinating and emotional installation. London is very different now, and as an ex-pat visiting his hometown this year after three decades abroad, Goldsworthy talks of finding a sad irony in the double erasure of its recent history: first the decimation of his generation by AIDS, and then gentrification. You do, though, need the background provided by Goldsworthy to pick that up, else all you get is disparate work with an aura of potential linkage. Other artists — de Chirico and Rauch, for example — make a virtue of frustrating our desire to make logical connections, but integrate their choices in a distinctive painterly language. Goldsworthy is a chameleon painter, choosing styles to match his sources. That may be thematically appropriate, but it does sacrifice that sense of the artist’s own visually coded world, which makes for more immediate appreciation.

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