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 version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 5, 2004.

Mark Greenwold has a problem. Actually, judging by his bizarre symbolist pictures, he has a few. But from a career perspective, his problem is what to put in his exhibitions. A painting apparently takes him at least a year to complete, and sometimes as long as four. At such a rate, his lifetime retrospective might end up being his first regular show.

One solution – an effective means to dramatize the adagio intensity of his production – is to stage a one-picture show, which is what his then new dealer did for him in 2002. “You must change your life” (2002), a 16-by-22-inch panel whose title presumably came from the last line of Rilke’s sonnet “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” was given one small side gallery while male wet dream academic nudes by the late Paul Cadmus filled the rest of DC Moore’s midtown premises. Cadmus and Mr. Greenwold made an odd couple: It was as if the almost gothic mannerism of the tortuous, psychologically obsessive, narcissistic Mr. Greenwold was knowingly mocking the slick, patrician proficiency of the “gay lord” of conservative American realism.

This time around, Mr. Greenwold has opted for another exhibition strategy, curating a group show that features his latest piece in the company of artists who exemplify a principle at stake in his own work. He did this once before, in “The Risk of Existence,” his 1998 parting show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in SoHo. But “Endless Love” creates more of a technical than an existential community. The selection brings together artists of diverse style, tendency, and touch who are united by their penchant to ponder.

Mr. Greenwold’s own new work, “The Need to Understand” (2002-03), literally puts three peers into his allegory: Hovering over the heads of the human protagonists (two women and, as ever, the artist himself, this time wearing the same dress as one of the women) are what read like haloes or thought bubbles. Each one is made up in a recognizable trademark device of a fellow painter. The woman entering from the back corridor has Lucas Samaras rays of light emanating from her cranium; the woman in the duplicated dress has a James Siena puzzle oozing from her Medusa-like hairdo; and Mr. Greenwold himself seems to be thinking in the wobbly lozenges of a Chuck Close grid.

Mr. Greenwold was famously the subject of Mr. Close’s “Mark” paintings and prints, based on a gormless 1970s photograph, while Mr. Close has in turn been depicted with equal unflattery in a number of Greenwolds. (For whatever it might signify, Mr. Siena and Mr. Samaras have also been depicted by Mr. Close.) Mr. Siena is the only of one of the three shown in his own right in “Endless Love.”

There, he is given pride of place on the wall where Mr. Greenwold himself hangs, along with ceramicist Ken Price and, sandwiching the Greenwold, Thomas Nozkowski and David Brody. By placing himself in this abstract power corner, Mr. Greenwold has ingeniously cosetted his own hyper-realist style: With no competing mimesis in proximity, the eye has its arm twisted – so to speak – into recognizing the abstract element of so overtly representational a painting.

For what makes Mr. Greenwold so slow a producer – and at the same time entices slow viewing of his work – is the mind-boggling minisculism of his painterly touch. At first sight, he seems to be the kind of painter who is rendering each hair of the cat and mouse that gracefully co-habit the foreground of the picture, not to mention each grain of the parquet of the library in the distance. But on closer inspection, a compulsion to pixilate is revealed at an even deeper level, in tiny, pinpoint, feathery strokes of complementary color. The result isn’t the pearly, opaque finish you might expect from hyperrealism but its opposite – an almost impressionistic fuzz: A Renoir painted under a microscope.

In “Endless Love,” Mr. Greenwold has created a salon of the self-absorbed. Within this group, there is more divergence than commonality, as he notes in a curatorial statement. While for some, he writes, labor-intensity is “compulsiveness bordering on pathology,” for others it is “merely the systematic intensity and dailiness of the professional, applying his or her craft in much the same manner as a good root-canal specialist.” Modernism, Mr. Greenwold argues, has made the craft element in art taboo, just as, correspondingly, it has made spontaneity a fetish.

This manifesto show presents a compelling case for compulsion: The artists gathered may lose themselves in craft, but the good ones (and those are the majority) find their vision in the same place.

Charles LeDray, for instance, makes exquisitely nutty miniature clothing – in “Hole” (1998), a punctured jacket, shirt, and tie hang on a minutely fabricated hanger and hook. Xenobia Bailey creates vaguely tribal-looking, overlapping spirals of crocheted yarn build up to psychedelic patterns. In both cases, a sense of the marginal that comes with slow, technically absorbing activity folds back into the meanings of the work.

Some artists aren’t such slow producers but seem enlisted for moral support. Alexi Worth is represented by a painting from his series charting the allegorical wanderings of an artworld nebbish; Mr. Worth’s alterego could be the cousin of Mr. Greenwold’s projected self. Like Mr. Worth, Hilary Harkness achieves intensity through knowing naffness, her cramped illustrational rendering sealed in by a coppery smoothness that recalls the German mannerist Adam Elsheimer.

For many artists in “Endless Love”, obsessive pattern-making or craft leads to a kind of negation of self, a mystical otherworldliness. Mr. Greenwold’s peculiarity is to arrive at a similar place himself despite-or who knows, maybe because of-so gross an involvement with his own psyche. Equally “anal” in what he depicts, and how, his painting represents a kind of tantric exorcism.

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