September 8 to October 22, 2016
536 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, info@fredericksfreisergallery.com

An opaque black bar covers a third of Fredericks & Freiser’s 24th Street window. This device serves a practical purpose: it prevents innocent eyes from catching a glimpse of the sexually-charged work on display. As it censors the erotic content inside, the bar draws attention to how the space of the gallery is divided. It cuts the window into thirds and sets up a series of binaries: interior and exterior, visible and obscured, permitted and prohibited. Perhaps unintentionally, perhaps on purpose, this gesture complements the pieces by Robert Overby shown inside by adding another layer on top of his already multi-layered work.

Robert Overby, born in 1935, received limited recognition as an artist prior to his death in 1993. His showing record at that point consisted of handful of exhibitions in Los Angeles, where he was better known as a graphic designer. Three years after his death, Fredericks & Freiser began attending to his legacy, this current outing being his sixth posthumous exhibition with the gallery. The pieces currently on view are united in that none of them bear Overby’s own signature but, rather, they are signed with an occasional pseudonym, “Esquire Showcard.”

Displayed front and center in the main room is the colossal painting the gallery is so eager to hide from the outside world: UT Daylillies (1977). It depicts a bottomless kneeling woman from behind — feet together, knees apart — with her green dress pulled above her waist and a backwards glance directed at the viewer. In the very center of the canvas is an “X,” lightly inscribed in pencil. This easily overlooked mark creates a purely formal focal point uncharged by the figure’s provocative posture or sensual gaze. The two other focal points — the figure’s face and genitalia — only draw our attention because of the meaning we give them. Nothing about those areas should, in formal terms at least, be any more attractive than the center of the composition.

The figure is framed by tulips and lilies that seem to float on a plane above her. The flowers look to have been painted by a different hand than the body: she is blurred and preliminary while they are sharp, exact, indeed nearly overworked. The effect is that of two paintings merged into one, as if the flowers were lifted from a magazine advertisement and collaged on top of an unfinished erotic painting. Many of Overby’s other works used literal layers of material to create similar effects. On the wall opposite Daylillies hangs No Title (ref #35), 17, 21, 22 March 1989, 8 Feb 88, a Polaroid with multiple layers of translucent acetate film taped to it. Each layer contains a small gouache painting of lines, grids, or dots. The impermanence of the tape gives the impression that the composition was never finalized, that Overby could come back and change the entire piece by rotating one piece of film or shifting another, hiding or revealing parts of the underlying photograph.

A suite of interconnected works are installed in the gallery’s back room (see installation shot, above). The space is dominated by Bonnie (1978), another large-scale painting of a female nude. The figure stands slightly off center on the canvas, with her right nipple serving as the piece’s focal point as well as the vanishing point for the perspectival lines radiating up from the floor and from the painting on the wall behind her. This painting, a yellow field flanked by thin blue stripes, is also in the room on the wall facing Bonnie. Yellow Blue (1978) is thus shown twice: mise-en-abysme in the fictional space of another painting, and in the real space of the actual gallery. Yellow Scoot (1970), an installation of extension cords and a yellow light bulb, has an intertextual connection with Bonnie as well. Depicted at the figure’s feet is a power socket; the wires of Yellow Scoot continue from where the space of the painting ends, the nude figure illuminated by the golden glow of a naked bulb from a world beyond the canvas.

Robert Overby left behind a body of work open to ongoing fruitful excavation. The black bar on the gallery’s window is one more layer stuck on top of the layers of acetate film of his collages, the layers of pictorial space in his paintings, and the layers of self-reference in works that reach out to each other through time and space. The black sticker will likely be peeled off and thrown away once the show comes down, but Overby’s oeuvre will remain, ready to be re-layered and rearranged in configurations he may have never predicted.

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November 28, 2012 to January 19, 2013
536 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-633-6555

David Humphrey is a jolly image-smasher.  Since the early 1990s he has been notable for paintings of surreal sexiness, postmodern snap, and painterly discrimination.  Overall, there has been a consistent trend from the small and dense to the large and loose.  Some of the loosest paintings yet are currently on display at Fredericks & Freiser; the thinning atmosphere might explain the space helmet on the astronaut who appears in a couple of them.

Wet gesture and windswept void have frequently invaded Humphrey’s sun-kissed suburban moonscapes, paint grammar vying flamboyantly with body and terrain.  But in Humphrey’s recent work, broom-sized gestures and dizzyingly thin expanses of acrylic glaze, hideous/gorgeous and outright quarrelsome, set the figures and their settings adrift in a storm.

In Scratcher (2012), for instance, a sleeping orange man has been severed by a huge blue-gray swipe that’s as feral as a Cy Twombly scrawl or an Albert Oehlen smear.  A zone of elegiac translucency surrounds the sleeper’s foreshortened, Transavanguardia-esque head and exposed nipple.  But the close harmony is shouted down by another huge swipe, this one icky-green, which dominates the upper right.  Below, a flagstone barbecue bolsters a black cat succubus who exacts vengeance on the orange man, or his sleeping bag, or body bag, as it continues past the gray swipe’s amputation.  The cat, whose eyes combust with infinitesimal fireworks, tracks bloody claw marks into the orange, reclaiming it from the calamity of abstraction.

Perhaps the artist’s own 1994 review of a Carl Ostendarp show (reprinted in his smart and lively collection, Blind Handshake) let this particular cat out of the bag:

His work encourages us to wonder if abstraction’s traditional aspiration to inhabit a space outside language has become a point of ridicule. Is a burlesqued form of that aspiration the new way of sustaining it?

And here is Humphrey in a complementary vein on Jörg Immendorff (2007):

Bigness, for Immendorff, was always complicated by crappiness, which, in the vernacular of ’80s German painting, indicated critical distance combined with a refined anarchistic connoisseurship; the artist must not show too much interest in the painting’s quality or risk betraying its radicality.

Put these two insights together and you get something like Humphrey’s new work: paintings that are acerbic and tangy, and resolve, if they do, only at a “critical distance.”  Which is the closest we can get, the paintings argue; nowadays it just isn’t possible to probe true feelings, even exalted ones, or base ones, without first seeing them for the mediated texts they really are.

Irony in Humphrey’s hands, though, is just a starting point for a risky and committed involvement with the karma of the medium.  I see him as a poster boy for the Democracy of Postmodern painting: Sure it’s the absolute worst form of art — except for all the others.  Humphrey’s “crappiness” is exactly what hones the claws of the cat in Scratcher.  She­ is desperate for a toehold at the very threshold of prowess.

Other paintings come down at different points along the spectrum of control, as if rehearsing the history of painterliness.  Kicking Back, (2012) is as cool and masterful as anything Humphrey has done, despite the aggressive presence of a huge brown smudge.  That’s because the smudge hovers within a hierarchy of signs: it can work as a POV depiction of one of those relaxing puffs after a tough day at the office, exhaled by the owner of the receding blue slacks (implicitly the viewer) who plays footsie with her Manolo Blahniks. The upturned floor’s consolidated whiteness, color-boosted with a yellow gradient, wafts the brown smudge right against our eyes, where it functions surprisingly well as Rembrandtian brush-smoke.

The fleshiest brushwork in the show, and also the most diagrammatic, can be found in The Red and the Blue, (2012) a complex homage to De Kooning, adapting the master’s signature late palette — with strategically placed eyeballs and tears, misregistered glyphs, leftover body crevices, and a possible fart joke added for spice.  Pink Couch, (2012) features, hanging over the furnishing of the title, a Magrittean painting within a painting.  The gag here is that this school-of-Resika landscape is stolidly fluffy while everything outside the frame is John-Wesley superflat, notably a cartoon cutie pie of color — a dubious composite, perhaps, of Manet’s Olympia and her African attendant, complete with cat.  (Is she teasingly covering up, or cowering?)

Humphrey is able to engineer pronounced stereo separation, in many of these paintings, between mess and mastery, between mimicry and mockery.  He dials it up to 11 in Changing Sneakers, (2011) which hurls an enormous abstract pile-up — Thomas-Nozkowski-meets-Amy-Sillman-as-crushed-by-John-Chamberlain —  at a light-struck figure shedding his photo-crisp Nikes.  But the determined young hunk lifts his eyes in another direction.

Everything about the clean-cut bantam in Changing Sneakers reminds me of Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ben, in The Graduate.  Humphrey himself invoked the iconic scene in which Ben is accosted with friendly career advice — “Just one word….Plastics” — in an essay on the sculptor Ian Dawson, who deforms plastic toys, just around the time of his own switch from oils to acrylics; his paintings ever since have been doing R & D on survival skills for “a world now more dramatically polymerized than anything those 1967 characters ever imagined.”

Acrylic surely has its weaknesses: it lacks, of course, the viscous, flesh-like luster of oils — also, for that matter, oil’s tendency toward mud, which in some hands is a renewable resource.  But Humphrey does not reject acrylic’s sickly pallor out of hand, and casts his lot with its plasticky strengths: chiefly, that it dries fast, allowing an artist with racing thoughts to stream consciousness.

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August 28 – October 4, 2008
536 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 633 6555

Follies, the title of Baker Overstreet’s solo painting exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, exists somewhere between theatrical put-on and shoe gazing self-awareness.  In architecture a “folly” is an ornamental, often eccentrically designed building. An example in New York City would be Central Park’s Belvedere Castle, a fairy tale landmark of eternal childhood. “Follies” is also the name of Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical, itself a reference to early 20th century vaudeville revues. The thirteen paintings on view (all made in 2008) share in the multifaceted whimsy of the exhibition’s title.  Painted in glossy, starburst hues of acrylic and latex, the first distinguishing characteristic of the set is a common black or dark grey background.  This technique calls to mind the high kitsch of black velvet painting as well as the glowing, black light posters, which adorned many teenage bedrooms in the 1970s.  The dark backdrop becomes a stage set for the real “action” of the paintings—an order of tight and flashy geometric designs.

The paintings lend themselves to the idea of a multi-tiered structure, part disco dance floor and part spaceship.  The abstractions can be read as dimensional objects, with a bottom and top orientation, or as a flat pattern plane.  Sequined Cyclone Sequence appears as a requiem for the old time religion of Coney Island. Combining a psychedelic maximal impulse with the restraint of a carefully painted bodega sign advertising ice cream cones, the painting throws itself into a readable architecture of forms and signs. The Continental Bathosphere, resemble a Masonic Temple with Jetsons-era columns framing a gilded series of orbs and hints of rainbows. An unabashed decorative energy is readily visible in all of the paintings. Circles and squares are outlined or dotted with smaller circles, sometimes collapsing the painting into itself, and other times gathering the wild abstraction in by the reins to resemble a coherent form.

All of the paintings radiate a smooth ease of formal decisions. Hints of past layers visible beneath the surface are the only counterpunch to a solid machine that affords little room for speculation beyond its shiny and seductive design. The label of “primitive” given to Overstreet and many of his peers in contemporary abstract painting belies a highly stylized, self-conscious approach to image construction. The perfect power chord is struck between the loose design of a sign painter and the drive towards layered spectacle.  From cool to warm, neon to primary, the color combinations seem intangibly homemade and magical. In each painting’s spectrum, there is a boldness and density that bears similarity to artists such as Alfred Jensen and Tal R.

Many of the paintings’ titles convey arche nostalgia for glamour, decadence and the iconic visuals of pinball machines. Alibaster Plaster Caster, Sizzle ’76, Ball in the Jack and Technicolor Chromolume all resonate as personal references to the lingo of 1960s and ‘70s culture. The paintings’ high voltage energy mixed with an implacable, hand-drawn symmetry results in a vaguely sinister authority. The line “fearful symmetry,” from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger,” kept repeating in my head as I walked from painting to painting. The pop of hot colors and ruler straight lines against the blackness commands an inanimate dominance of space.  Mandala shapes and the repetition of forms lend the paintings the severity of totemic worship.  Jewel-like and complete unto itself, it is form of worship that doesn’t extend past the painting’s flat surface.

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January 25 – March 1, 2008

The visual universe that Sean McCarthy has created is in a perpetual state of violence or potential violence. A quote from Hobbes’ Leviathan comes to mind, “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” The demons in these drawings represent the eternal return of death and violence.

His inventive and mind-bogglingly exacting technical skills and more importantly his imaginative powers are on display in this exhibition. Seeing such straightforwardly creative works of visual art in a Chelsea gallery raises interesting questions about the role of invention in the contemporary art world. I was surprised to see fantastic and concisely rendered drawings that weren’t ironic or means to end within a portentous conceptual framework.

McCarthy’s chimerical hybrid creations, which include anatomical details of various animals, human genitalia and anatomy, specifically breasts and a threateningly large penis, are sphinx-like. They are mysterious and inscrutable, in that their individual characteristics undermine any symbolic reading of them. They stay rooted in the real world, but also convey a complete sense of otherness.

The demons McCarthy has invented sneer, grimace, unflinchingly stare, look world weary, give sidelong glances, and stare at us and upwards with the blank amoral expressions of non-human organic life. They are poised, dignified, self assured, and without empathy. He convinces us of their materiality but he also places them in mysterious voids, in non-specific settings that reverberate with a sense of timelessness. He plays with the process of symbolization, gaining strength from his ability to render the unreal with the fervor of a devoted realist, while making the actions of his imaginary demons vague but purposeful.

McCarthy interpreted text from the books The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King and Colin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, which are well known in demonology circles and include descriptions of demons and drawings of their seals, as inspiration for many of the demons he invented for these ink and graphite drawings. The main source for The Goetia was a book by Johann Weyer (1515-1588), who was a pioneer in psychiatry and medicine, and also a firm believer in magic and the occult. These contradictory impulses, an interest in the superstitious and the empirical are reflected in McCarthy’s style.

Astaroth, 2007, consists of a tightly cropped portrait of the upper body of a weird creature that includes many anatomically correct segments of living creatures such as snakes, earthworms, porcupines, and humans. With McCarthy’s interpretation of very inexact physical descriptions, he took great care to represent the animal elements in exacting detail, but he also took liberties with the creature, conceptually and formally sewing together odd bits and pieces from multiple sources to create a nightmarish amalgamation. The viewer experiences the imposing nature of this creature and would not want to meet it, ever.

In Flehmen Response, 2007, whose title is defined as “a particular type of curling of the upper lip in ungulates, felids, and many other mammals, which facilitates the transfer of pheromones and other scents into the vomeronasal organ”, we see a grimacing winged zebra getting impaled by a caterpillar like spore creature. The artist has been inspired by an animal to animal interaction, which in the real world usually indicates stimulation, and in McCarthy’s world translates into violence and death. Clearly sex and death are neatly combined in this static moment of creature combat.

McCarthy’s technique is really what differentiates these masterful drawings from the typical fair one would find on heavy metal album covers or in kitschy fantasy publications. He never resorts to using shading. His drawings are built entirely upon the interaction of dots and lines. Often his lines are so compact that they are dashes, half an inch long or less. Studying the complicated surface ofAnastomosis, 2007, a drawing of a self-devouring, writhing mass of unpleasant organic textures, one is dumbstruck by the controlled and highly effective use of stippling. By carefully determining the quantity and placement of individual dots, he describes shadows and surface details and textures, and enhances the three-dimensionality of the tubular forms. Carefully placed dots are used to describe convexities and concavities. Like in other compositions in this exhibition, the viewer is not sure if these organic fragments are copulating or devouring one another.

One would have to imagine an abstract expressionist composition made with flailing swathes of body parts inspired by oceanic and insect life to picture Void, 2007. This complicated interpretation of the well known Greek symbol of the snake devouring itself in perpetuity, or the Ouroboros, is filled with a variety of meticulously rendered dentate, claws, and eyes swirling around in some numinous substance, entangled in a never-ending act of engulfment. Certainly the symbolic undertones are relevant to this day and age. In Ambergris, 2007, a drawing of a sperm whale vomiting forth a veritable maelstrom of nightmarish creatures along with its own entrails, has more to do with the scriptural Leviathan, “the symbol of evil, focal point of all human fears, embodiment of unmitigated power,” rather than the waxy substance that originates in the intestines of the sperm whale. These are drawings about evil being unleashed upon the world, about a timeless evil wielding power over the temporal world or perhaps giving birth to it.

Hieronymus Bosch must have derived some enjoyment from envisioning the unbridled power of his demons, their sadistic acts committed against condemned humans. Interestingly, McCarthy’s demons fight one another or stand poised to attack an unknown entity. The idea of the fallen, so crucial to the hierarchies in Bosch’s compositions, is entirely missing in McCarthy’s imagined realms. McCarthy synthesizes the demon and its human victim and tells us more about our world than we want to know.

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Hilary Harkness through June 25 at Mary Boone, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-752-2929.

Thomas Trosch through June 10 at Fredericks Freiser, 504 W 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-633-6555.

Can a socially progressive male critic use the term “girlie” without getting lynched? Conscience and propriety would suggest not, yet an ascendant artworld aesthetic cries out for just this word.

Show after show, it seems, of emerging arists feature Barbie-like stick-figures, delicate, often saccherine colors, wilfully adolescent touch and a hyperbolic feyness that collides an inner child with a post-feminist sensibility. Whether the imagery is diaristic, narrative, or a postmodern jumble, the exemplar for the girlie generation, perversely enough, seems to be the wacky, tortured visionary Henry Darger: young women artists are as devoted to the Chicago janitor as he was to the Vivian Girls of his magnum opus.

Amy Wilson is an extreme example of this: “The Global Appeal of Liberty,” as her show is titled, closing this weekend at Bellwether, reveals an artistic personality split between psychological intensity and total drippiness, with a fusion of anal graphic handling and delicate watercolor, on the one hand, and long, bewildering bubble captions in a neat, fastidious script, on the other. The aesthetic is somewhere between medievalism and 5th grade.

What Ms. Wilson has in common with three other current exhibitions that warrant closer attention is a charged collision of the obsessive and the ditsy: one of these shows is even by a man, just to prove there is nothing “essentialist” in the girlie aesthetic.

At the front project room at Feigen Contemporary, Elizabeth Huey’s instense, involved symbolist narratives, often starring angels, little girls, and deer (a favored motif of the girlie generation, pace Maureen Cavanaugh and Jenny Scobel) are set in primal forests with intricately rendered Tudor mansions or oppressively bland institutional or utilitarian buildings as lurking presences.

A recent Yale MFA graduate, Ms. Huey’s made a strong debut at Michael Steinberg last year. Combining folkoristic, religious, scientific and historical imagery, she pits naivité and sophistication against one another in terms, equally, of subject matter, artistic language, and attitude; the same dichotomy relate to her own interestingly split intentions.

Her show is dominated by a monumental diptych: “ The Cyclothymic Forest,” (2005). The figure of a young woman in a stylish, slightly retro dress repeats in mirror form at the joining edges, suggesting she is the “Girl, Interrupted” of the psychological disorder referenced in the title. But the two canvases fail to divide along bipolar lines, as degrees of elation and enervation permeate both halves. She is lost in her forest of signs: washed out gray sheep meander along pathways; men in green jackets empty likely toxic contents of a bucket down a manhole; a dominatrix with a blanked-out face struts around; illustration book twin girls with spindly legs, one dressed in Indian feathers and a bandit mask, look on. The figures seem pasted in, oblivious of one another, their costumes appropriated from different epochs and unrelated dramas, and yet this is far from being a flattened-out, arbitrary decorative schemes: the elements are held together by a strong narrative urge.

In Ms. Huey’s handling, incongruity has neither the menace or humor of surrealism nor the cyncism of such image anarchists as David Salle or Sigmar Polke. What she offers instead, bravely, is an internalized bipolarity, with a handling and rendering that veers from masterful confidence to mousey feebleness, lyricism to quiet angst.

***

The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in Ms. Huey: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be oldmasterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveal the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

***

“Pardon me if I seem lost in a world like a girl in a dream,” exclaims the bubble above the head of one of Thomas Trosch’s protagonists, a middle-aged lady presiding over a suburban salon. Mr. Trosch’s paintings are a risqué satire of modern art and bourgeois femininity. His absurdly camp style has often been compared with Florine Stettheimer in terms of whimsicality, naivité, and jolly palette, but where Stettheimer’s subject was her own high powered interaction with the pioneers of American modernism (Duchamp was a fixture in her salon) fused with a language, however fey, of personal intensity, Mr. Trosch offers a different edge in his collision of subject and style. He has almost recognizable Abstract Expressionist masters, or at least their spin-offs, blend with his rococo touch and girlie palette, sending up the supposed machismo of these heroic masters. But Mr. Trosch is demostrably more than a mere satirist: within the histrionics of his own tongue in cheek style he is concerned with the same formal issues as his mid-century artistic victims, for all that he tries to seem as blasé about them as his ladies-who-lunch fashion victims.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 2005

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