February 25 to April 23, 2016
520 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2050

It’s a rare and noteworthy instance when an exhibition is so lacking in substance that nothing can really be said in its defense — Anna Ostoya’s current show, “Slaying,” at Bortolami achieves this. The content here revolves around an investigation of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–20), by way of Cubist reproductions of the original image. The renderings are half-heartedly self indulgent, devoid of any inkling of the humanity, blood, or violence that the original conveys, and they insult all that is interesting about Cubist space. They don’t even offer a systematic investigation leading from one study to the next. Rather in choosing to pursue an associative, as opposed to an analytical approach, the artist strips away any chance the viewer may have to find meaning in this series. As the press release points out, “art making is like the act of slaying – an archaic activity, quite brutal when taking seriously. Facing reality can feel as brutal as a beheading,” [sic]. But Ostoya’s investigations are anything but brutal. Actually, if any congratulations should be given for the show, they are deserved for her ability to make a decapitation look blasé.

Looking at Holofernes Slaying Holofernes (all works 2016), on a formal level, we see generalized forms that suggest Cubism but read more like computer-generated animation, neutral colors, and a democratic placement of emphasis. In this study, Ostoya has given the slayer and the slain the head of Holofernes. In another study, Judith Slaying Judith, with all the same considerations, she has given the two main characters Judith’s head. One untitled work is a close-up of Judith’s head, applying, yet again, all the same aesthetic concerns of digital-looking fractured planes. And then there’s Holofernes, which is the same thing as Judith’s close-up, except it’s Holofernes, but for some reason it’s titled, whereas the Judith portrait isn’t. There’s an even more generalized study, Untitled, which is the same as the other paintings, only there aren’t really any heads, everything turned to abstract polygons.

One must question the arbitrary and flippant nature of the formal changes occurring from one painting to the next. Ostoya claims to move away from a commonly utilized feminist reading of this painting towards a gender-neutral depiction that speaks to some ambiguous, ubiquitous hazard in which “the slaying of the unknown ‘other’ endangers the vulnerable ‘I’.” Whatever that means. In being capricious and vague, the only thing this artist risks is boring the viewer to death. What’s more is that the undermining of the feminist interpretation of this painting takes power away from women at the present and vital time in art’s history where women are only beginning to be treated as equals to the white men.

Perhaps it is the complete severance from exegesis, as biblical apocrypha and the history of the original painting, which is what initiated the chaos and meaninglessness present in the exhibition. In the Old Testament, Judith was an actual, Israeli heroine who tricked the Assyrian general, Holofernes into drinking too much. And when he was asleep, she came to his quarters and decapitated the oppressor of her people with the help of her lovely, young maidservant. Gentileschi, whose given name was derived from Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was considered to be one of the most accomplished painters of the Baroque period (a time no less when it was impossible for women to pursue painting in the first place). She was raped by her mentor and excused for his crime in court. Despite the brutal injustices she faced, she continued to paint and created, what one would speculate as a form of catharsis and vindication, her masterpiece Judith Slaying Holofernes.

But there is no trace of that history here. In a smaller side gallery, a series of inkjet prints serve as a sort of footnote to Ostoya’s thesis. It’s a whole mess of Photoshopped versions of the original painting reiterating the same ideas in her oil versions. In many of the prints, the painting’s elements are superimposed over each other; in others, yet another layer of confusion is added through the introduction of non-sequential information such as geometric design, color splatters, and robots.

Walking away from this exhibition one is reminded of the importance of clarity over cleverness; that often plain, well-considered ideas can say much more — and may even allow one to get away with murder.

The post Really Killer: Anna Ostoya’s Judith appeared first on artcritical.

May 10 to June 16, 2012
547 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-677-4520

Judith Murray’s current show at Sundaram Tagore presents a stunning departure for this boldly original painter with a significant body of work dating to the 1970s. She could be classed as a latter-day Abstract Expressionist in that her work is always abstract and also deeply expressive. But there the similarities to other American painters ends. The ‘70s paintings exhibited stark, incisive, and often brooding or aggressive forms in red, white, and beige against a black background. Their effect was exhilarating and disturbing. A thin stripe down the right-hand edge of the canvas that first appeared in these works has become a permanent element in all her paintings, in effect anchoring the rest of the canvas to the picture’s frame. Over the years, she has remained faithful to the use of only these four colors, mixing and combining them to produce a seemingly infinite variety of shades and shapes. The discipline of restricting herself to this palette has given a kind of subliminal, even invisible, stability to the body of her work.

In more recent years, Murray’s style developed into often-large paintings of slightly increased palette in which mostly short brushstrokes are seen literally scrambling and chasing each other in lively patterns across the canvas.  In these most recent works there are still the backgrounds mostly of black; and there are the masterful assemblies of Cézanne-like short brushstrokes into lively patterns that sweep across a painting’s surface, as if a wind had blown into the painting and rearranged all its elements. But there is something else that is very new. Scattered among the animated brushstrokes are small, abstract forms in Murray’s basic colors that recall, in miniature, her ‘70s canvases. They seem to be there at random, flying around on their own on the background of myriad strokes brushed against a deeper background of black or another solid color. But of course their placement is artfully chosen. In First Day (2011), a canvas of 72 by 77 inches, I counted fifteen of these mischievous gremlin shapes that give the impression of having invaded the more mature, even serious, world of Murray’s signature patterns. In some of the paintings they are not immediately apparent, lurking somewhere until the viewer suddenly thinks, “Oh, there’s another!” He may also think, “What the hell are these?” A measure of Murray’s skill is that none of these forms, of which there must be close to a hundred throughout the paintings in the show, make any reference at all to common shapes. There is no “That looks like a hat” or “That looks like a unicorn.”

The message of these powerful paintings is ambiguous. Are these miniature shapes sinister little invaders of the canvases’ otherwise expansive and essentially stable overall patterns or cute little devils disporting themselves gleefully against backgrounds that are often more dire, even threatening? The ambiguity only adds to their power.

Judith Murray is an unjustly neglected American painter: there have been no false moves in her career, only a steady progression toward assured next developments. Her hand has always been steady and authoritative. And as always in Murray’s work for many years, the new paintings may be called beautiful.

The post Neither Hats Nor Unicorns: Judith Murray at Sundaram Tagore appeared first on artcritical.