Mary Boone Gallery
April 28 to July 29, 2016
745 Fifth Avenue (at 58th Street)
New York, 212 752 2929

Callicoon Fine Arts
April 28 to July 29, 2016
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

“Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.”

-William Bradford Of Plimoth Plantation (ca 1630–51)

It’s a wild mind that riffs off a 17th-century devotional/historical text as source material for a contemporary painting exhibition. But as a road map to its thought-corridors, the vintage Pilgrim images that appear collaged onto Mayflower Now (2015) and Coin (2015) are a key to understanding the questing journey of Sadie Benning’s pilgrim soul, recently on view in twin exhibitions at Callicoon Fine Arts and Mary Boone Gallery. That these large, visually seductive, and lushly colored works are freighted with pointed critiques of organized religion, among other concerns, only ups Benning’s philosophical ante. And if a reductive vocabulary of pictographs and collaged islands of glistening color are the bullets in his magazine, the approach is clear — simpler is better when you want to hit the target.

Benning’s ripped-from-the-headlines commentary on the North Carolina transgender bathroom-access debate hews particularly close to home; he transitioned from female to male in recent years. In the show’s signal image, The Crucifixion (2015), on view at Callicoon, he lays out his precis: a nearly seven-foot-tall, Prussian blue, skirt-wearing female figure is nailed to a black cross, on a blood-red background. The figure has small breasts and a jutting form below the waist that can be read as either a baby-bump or a steatopygous rump. But it is the disproportionately large, and plainly phallic head that serves to deliver the message here: we are all in North Carolina. The figure as a whole also cites the gender-indicating pictographs on public restroom doors.

Not all of the works in these shows telegraph their politics, though an abstract work like Nature (2015) seems to witness the aftermath of a hunt. Worm God (2015) is another abstraction, its palette, form and technique suggestive of Matisse’s cut-outs. Benning assembles these works by mixing acrylic paint with resin or a milk-based casein, applying it to canvas, then cutting out shapes to be collaged. As such, there’s precious little painting qua painting, with nary a brushstroke in evidence.

Worm God is displayed along with six other God-paintings, all along a line on one wall at Mary Boone, to form what serves for a frieze. Though they are separate works, there is a thematic harmony, which lends a cinematic storyboard effect to their cheek-by-jowl placement. Grey God (2015) works off a gravestone-rubbing vibe, but shares with the two Green God paintings (both 2015) at Callicoon the pictorial design of a child’s clown painting.

Benning is clearly not shy about mixing styles; the monochrome Guts (2015) looks back to an earlier series that first caught this observer’s attention at Callicoon’s booth at the 2014 NADA New York art fair. And The Owl and the King (2015), which dominates one wall at Mary Boone, is one of his most photo-dominated collage-paintings. It also provides a backdrop for his curious inclusion of three-dimensional pagan god statuettes, the type you might find at a flea-market, which sit atop small shelves on the surfaces of this and several of the other paintings. The Owl And The King might also be an homage to Mike Kelley, with its front-and-center image of a neglected Muppet doll splayed Death of Marat-like atop a discarded cardboard shipping box.

Several of the works represent an indulgence in Pop art; The Boxer (2015), Priest (2016) and Fruits (2015) are the least successful works among these groupings of different stylistic approaches, especially with Priest, where the juxtaposition of a photograph of a priest with a statuette of a pagan god is simply too pat, too illustrative.

The continuing presence of filmic images, whether sourced from found newspaper photos or from what appear to be family snapshots, is a historical thread that runs through Benning’s family history to his earliest art world forays. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1973. Benning’s father James is a maker of independent art films and a longtime CalArts professor. At 19, he was given a show of memorably crude but arrestingly compelling video works at the Museum of Modern Art. A year later he was selected for inclusion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Still, Benning’s pilgrim journey from downtown darling to selling out an uptown solo show at blue-chip Mary Boone (and also at his primary gallery, Callicoon) has taken 20 years. So the hot today/gone tomorrow syndrome will definitely not apply here. And given the broadly diverse range of his practice — video, painting, multi-media works — we’ll likely be enjoying many new facets of Sadie Benning for decades to come.

The post Old Gods and New: Sadie Benning at Callicoon and Mary Boone appeared first on artcritical.

January 10 through February 14, 2015
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

John Miller: Here in the Real World at Mary Boone Gallery

Curated by Piper Marshall
January 10 through February 28, 2015
541 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 752 2929

Contemporary society is being constantly “bombarded by images” if the tiresome cliché is to be believed. It’s the cost of living in an information economy in which every moment of every person’s attention has been monetized and commodified. Practitioners of “old” media like painting occasionally invoke this platitude to make the “slowness” of their chosen medium seem transgressive or revolutionary in comparison to our “fast-paced culture.” John Miller, in a two-part exhibition split between Mary Boone and Metro Pictures, takes our attention economy as his baseline and, rather than trying to define himself in opposition to it, plays a game of trompe l’oeil that uses personal and media-sourced images to toy with notions of the materiality of art and the value of human, mechanical, and digital labor.

While Miller has embraced a wide range of materials throughout his long career, painting is the focus of both exhibitions. At Metro Pictures, a series of shaped Dibond panels depicting anonymous pedestrians fill one room: while these pieces may look like cut-out black-and-white photographs from a distance, they are painted in a thin acrylic grisaille that barely hides the artist’s preliminary pencil marks. The figures cast shadows on the walls behind them and seem to float in a featureless void. Carrying shopping bags, staring into space or gazing down at their phones, Miller’s pedestrians present themselves for the gaze of others while simultaneously looking oblivious to their excised surroundings. The pedestrian paintings are an offshoot of Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project, an ongoing endeavor in which the artist takes a photograph every day between 12 and 2pm. While his original photographs aren’t shown in either exhibition, the pedestrians and two murals, one in each gallery space, originate from this larger project.

From across the room, each mural appears to be a black-and-white photograph of a Chinatown street scene (at Mary Boone) or a back-alley loading dock (at Metro Pictures). The originary photographic images have been subjected to heavy manipulation that may not be obvious at a distant glance. Each image has been reduced to flat grayscale shapes, fragmented, and printed on vinyl wallpaper. Pedestrians, windows, and signs have been duplicated and cloned within the street scene: a stretched-out sign repeats the same Chinese characters a half dozen times, while a man and his doppelganger each cross the street with identical strides. One side of each scene is a mirror image of the other, with enough exceptions that this process isn’t immediately apparent (words and street signs aren’t mirrored along with the rest of the image). The mirroring is more obvious in the loading dock mural, which has its reflective axis placed in the corner of the room. The stones and debris on the ground beneath the platform are not mirrored; neither is the graffiti on the otherwise identical walls. Somewhere in there is an image of reality, something depicting the actual world, but we have no way of knowing which fragments, if any, retain that indexicality.

Instead of pedestrians, Mary Boone has a series of paintings of game show sets, depopulated of any contestants and presented as garishly colored stages. Unlike the pedestrians and the murals, these pieces appear to be photographs from afar, and still appear photographic rather than painterly when inspected up close. While the gallery checklist records them as “acrylic on canvas,” they look more like inkjet prints of digitally compressed YouTube screenshots. The twist is that this series was made between 1998 and 1999, several years before such technologies became widely available. Like the murals (which could have been made equally well using a quick Photoshop cutout filter or painstakingly rendered by hand) we have no way of knowing how much (if any) human, mechanical, or digital labor went into the production of these paintings. If the artist and gallery are to be taken for their word, it’s a clever “Mechanical Turk” trick: the paintings look digital but were apparently painted by hand. One piece, Labyrinth I (1999) has a motion-controlled speaker mounted above it that plays the garbled sounds of a crowd whenever anyone walks by. The canvas is rounded on the edges, giving it the shape of an old CRT television set. Labyrinth I could pass for an abstract geometric painting if not for a fragment of a sign, reading “HOME GYM,” a prize that gives the bright colors and curves their meaning as game show stage elements. Despite the dated references to The Price is Right and obsolete televisions, these pieces have aged surprisingly well: they may have greater resonance today thanks to Miller’s apparent prognostication of the explosion of streaming Internet video services that chop up, compress, and reconstitute images without requiring human intervention.

While the technique behind the game show paintings is mysterious, a more recent series of paintings, split between both galleries, offers a more transparent view of the artist’s process with depictions of reality show contestants in moments of apparent emotional collapse. Like the aforementioned cliché regarding today’s saturation of images, denigration of reality TV has become a trope among those who feel their own cultural consumption is above such base programming. A number of artists have engaged this medium without being so patronizing: performance artist and writer Kate Durbin’s book E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014) consists of scripts, screenplays, and retellings of reality show scenarios written in the deadpan style of a stenographer. Miller’s reality-show paintings deal with their emotionally charged content with a similar detachment. Close-up shots of heads dominate the canvases, looking more like preliminary underpaintings in umber and white than like finished works. Much thinner than the similarly toned pedestrian series, each painting’s grid and pencil marks are visible even at a distance. While many painters strive to cover up their sketches, Miller seems to embrace the honesty of this technique, stripping away figure painting’s veil of naturalism and presenting these paintings as records of his manual labor.

The games Miller plays with manual, mechanical, and digital reproduction disorient the viewer, calling into question assumptions about the ways in which our sense of reality is mediated through the images and programming to which we are “constantly exposed” (to use another cliché). While the grisaille paintings of pedestrians and reality TV stars emphasizes the hand of the artist and his process, the murals and game show paintings disrupt such fetishization of manual labor by making us agnostic to the actual nature of their production. The pieces on view in both galleries bask in the paradoxical history of their materiality and production: some are naked paintings that plainly exhibit the marks of their creation while other paintings may or may not be “paintings” at all. Miller’s games may be rewarding to some and frustrating to others, but the disorientation he channels is the essence of our age: the loss of distinction between fact and fiction, original and copy, humanity and digitality.

The post This is Real Life: John Miller’s Crafting of Mediated Vision appeared first on artcritical.

In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

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Michèle C. Cone,  Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Ai Weiwei, Slater Bradley, Sarah Sze, and Lola Montes Schnabel.

The post January 2012: Michèle C. Cone, Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Macho masterpiece intentions are baked into the very setting of Eric Fischl’s paintings of the Corrida Goyesca.  By all rights these life-and-death-size duels in the sun between bullfighters and bulls should be awful, stripped of the mystery and mediation that until now had been the artist’s stock-in-trade.  No longer is the narrative a salacious, question-begging blur which relentlessly exploits a sweet seam of collector-class reflexivity.  No layering of time, place, and causation neutralizes the camera’s primacy in these transcriptions of decisive moments.  And Fischl’s signature befuddled technique can’t so easily masquerade as a dexterous X-ray of the corpse of painting, or else as a heartfelt rummaging for form, or both.  In the shadeless corrido, ineptitude, no matter how studied or brooding, will get you killed.

Throughout his career, Fischl has kept “bad” and “good” painting in the air like a pair of translucent beachballs. At the 1983 Whitney Biennial, the grotesque concatenating of fleshy white Americans on a Caribbean beach with desperate Haitians washing up in Florida seemed valid, if not mesmerizing, but what did it have to do with a tortured non-chalance about painting the figure? Fischl quickly abandoned politics and returned to his true subject, the noir boudoir of the suburban mind. But Fischl’s drive to paint well proved genuine. In the intervening 25 years Fischl has taught himself a great deal about anatomy, drama, light, color, atmosphere, surface, and attack

But was improving his skills a good thing?  Recent forays into sexy Roman statuary, tourist exoticism, and Bauhaus fashion shoots had threatened to leave Fischl exposed as a credulous consumer of his own 50-page bibliography.  And now, here was Fischl declaring himself a matador to the wounded beast of great painting, nicely setting himself up for a critical goring.

Thinking I’d be there to bury, I found much to praise.  An elegant frieze of poised, form-fitted buttocks in Corrido in Rondo No. 6 (all 2008) arpeggiates a velvety chord of tonic silhouettes across the dominant pink glare of background sand.  The four victorious killers are dynamic and buoyant, yet solidly constructed, suggesting a stripped-to-essentials version of Manet’s stripped-to-essentials version of Veronese — a thousand times more crude but effective all the same.  The matadors in these paintings are not young, and the marvelously chewed face of the veteran leader of this quadrillo hints at confederacy with a jaded Leon Golub colonel.

Corrido in Rondo No. 3 is an unapologetic paean to Goya’s great Jekyll-and-Hyde synthesis of the canny and the brutal.  Here the bull looms across the middle ground, held in tension by the graphic competence of his profile against a hint of architecture.  Following the master, Fischl squares the circular ring and sets up receding scrims of texture and temperature that vibrate with spatial conflict.  Most of the bulls in the show are downed, with scumbled blotches of cadmium oozing from their wounds, but this one still patrols dangerously, contained solely by visual guile.  The decorous sheen of the matador’s cape waves the bull from washed-out, steely light into foreground shadow, onward to exhaustion in his doomed chase of illusions.  Goya himself is said to have designed the vivid costumes, and while Fischl’s palette is almost Neapolitan, the clear, smart rhythms of warm and cool distribution are all Goyesca business.

The pirouetting matador of No. 3 bends backwards with perfect balance.  As with most of these paintings, Fischl makes use of a ritually balletic postcard moment in order to ardently convince us, perhaps for the first time in his career, of a figure’s groundedness and weight.  But one telling exception is made with Corrido in Rondo No. 4. Here the airborne, twisting feet of the matador flop like a rag doll’s; he seems caught in a moment of indecision as to whether to turn his back on the bull’s resting brawn and upraised horns.  Fischl’s disdain to attach the feet to the body seems like a holdover from a former strategem: subversive postural disorganization derived from the capricious snapshot, the wicked cool of Bacon, and urgent clumsiness.  There will be viewers who prefer this otherwise impeccable painting for the very reason of its refusal to play to bourgeois taste.  Of course, that refusal has long constituted its own status quo, and Fischl appears now to have taken up the mantle of classical rigor over – or at least alongside – aging, punk, post-modernist non/sense.  80 percent of Fischl’s massive success has always consisted in just showing up.  By no means is this as negligible a feat as it sounds, but with theCorrido paintings currently on view, the remaining 20 percent can and should be held to account as well.

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In the 1980s, when painting was beleaguered and abstract painting under much pressure, Peter Halley was one of the few younger abstractionists who attracted attention. His distinctive hard-edge pictures were accompanied by his theorizing that, inspired by Michel Foucault, offered a highly suggestive social history. This interpretative account took us from Mondrian, Rothko and Frank Stella to his own images that Halley identified as “paintings of prisons, cells, and walls.” Modernism was finished, he argued, which for him meant that what were usually taken to be abstract works of art, including his own paintings, were in fact representations of the structure of power in contemporary urban society. At the time, I greatly admired his writing and enjoyed his pictures, whilst always finding their relationship highly problematic. But then the same problem arises, in my judgment, with the writings of Mondrian, Rothko and Stella, whose self-interpretations are also often hard to take literally.

In the 1980s Halley, who attracted sympathetic commentary by critics who otherwise didn’t like painting by younger contemporary artists, was in effect seen as a sociologist who also made art. Now, however, we are ready to appreciate him as a painter. How different are his unreal acrylic and roll-a-text colors from those of Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, which by comparison feel so subdued. The total artificiality of Halley’s paintings makes it natural to compare them with glossy color photographs or video images. Brice Marden’s early and late paintings relax your gaze; Halley always offers a wake up call. And yet, in some other ways Halley’s art is traditional. Compared with Stella’s three-dimensional constructions of the past twenty years, how closely is Halley tied to the traditions of painting. It would be instructive to set Halley’s paintings in an exhibit of hard edge abstractions by Josef Albers, Donald Judd and John McLaughlin. His surfaces do, however, have some relationship with those of the 1960s sculptures by John McCracken. And it would be worthwhile juxtaposing his textures, smooth against rough, next to those of Clyfford Still. Once in the 1990s, I attended an Italian exhibition at which Halley and Sean Scully were present. After Halley described his aesthetic, Scully remarked that his was quite different. How interesting, then, it would be to set Halley’s Day-Glo colors alongside Scully’s oil paintings, which offer a very different image of urban reality.

Whatever the ultimate fate of Halley’s theorizing, this marvelous exhibition shows how well his paintings have held up. However you interpret his cells and connecting lines, they provide the basis for marvelously compositions. Halley is an artist who shows best in intense artificial light and reflective floors, which are provided here. It is surprising, indeed, how much variety he gets from a simple format, playing smooth against rough textures, and juxtaposing his basic geometric forms. These paintings, which twenty-five years ago were presented as illustrations of a theory of art have become aesthetic artifacts. It is fascinating to see how a culture dates.  However much you once strove to be of your time, if your painting deserves ongoing attention, it is because it can legitimately be compared with canonical works gathered in museums. Halley’s early work passes that test.

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In the back room at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, a Norman Foster glass and steel table struggles to keep up with the streamlined efficiency and grace of its occupant: a svelte, always impeccably attired gentleman who demurely works away with elegance and diligence. This is Ron Warren.  First time visitors sometimes wonder if, rather than a gallerist doing his work, this is not, in actual fact, performance art. To clients and press people, however, Ron is the exemplary gallery worker—helpful, informative, and in a quiet, respectful and unobtrusive way, passionate about the artists he is looking after. In the spirit of Labor Day, Mary Boone Gallery is honoring a quarter century of his service with a show, 25 for 25: A Tribute to Ron Warren, 12 September to 24 October 2009. The artists on view are to be Richard Artschwager, Jean Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Will Cotton, Inka Essenhigh, Eric Fischl, Peter Halley, Hilary Harkness, Jim Hodges, Roni Horn, Terence Koh, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Barry Le Va, Sherrie Levine, Adam Mc Ewen, Aleksandra Mir, Jack Pierson, Marc Quinn, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Keith Sonnier, Philip Taaffe, and Richard Tuttle.

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Unbelievably, painting is yet again under assault. Despite strength of activity evident in commercial galleries, art school degree shows, and studios, the medium is held in suspicion thanks to its virtual exclusion from the Whitney Biennial and the inaugural exhibitions of the new New Museum. Once more, oil on canvas is made to feel like a guilty pleasure.

There is no better way to savor that sensation than in the enjoyment of “Bad” painting. In this strange stylistic phenomenon of conceptually driven academicism, kitsch, and mannerism, painterly technique is less a means to end than an end in itself. Being a painter becomes a performance, a posture.

And yet, once they make a career out of this position, painters are in an odd place: however tongue-in-cheek they may have been about painterly quality, the sheer mechanics of working in traditional styles, confronting the very problems that were historically the motor of stylistic development, means that their “bad” painting gets better. There is progression within their transgression.

Two iconoclasts currently showing now are in danger of getting so good as to become iconic: Delia Brown, at D’Amelio Terras, and Hilary Harkness, at Mary Boone. Both artists manage to collide issues of gender and technique in ways that give avant-garde edge to their formal finesse: “old master” technique is played off against the femininity of their motifs.

Delia Brown’s show is titled “Precious,” a suitably ambiguous term, equally connoting treasure and affectation. Her subject is mother-child relations, so the word fits the sense of intense connection. But it also sits well with the highly wrought surfaces of these compressed genre scenes, which are generally no more than a foot and half in their longest dimension. She depicts figures in luxurious domestic interiors in a virtuoso style, at once tightly observed and dashed off. They merge the unabashed sentimentality of Norman Rockwell and the bravura brushwork of John Singer Sargent.

Ms. Brown chose her models from among acquaintances in their late 30s, women nearing the outer reach of childbearing age who are not yet actually mothers. The kids they are posed with were borrowed. Knowing this adds a layer of “as if”-ness that bolsters the artifice of the artist’s investment in her appropriated, academic figurative language.

Sargent notwithstanding (the artist’s printed notes also cite Mary Cassatt, Fragonard and Balthus as pictorial points of reference), Ms. Brown’s work more strongly recalls mid-20th Century traditionalists like John Koch, and countless marginal, conservative artists whose commissioned family portraits graced upper middle class homes of that period than they do bona fide art historical sources.

Ms. Brown’s preciousness relates to a broad current of contemporary women artists presided over by Elizabeth Peyton (whose latest show closes at Gavin Brown this weekend) who knowingly fuses commercial illustration style and fey emotion. Ms. Harkness’s intense detail and miniaturist skill, equal parts old master and comic book, fits the same somewhat nerdish aesthetic.

In her statement, Ms. Brown understands the gender issues of her stylistic departure in historic terms. “In painting school, one was told not to be ‘precious,’ which was a way of saying that one must instead be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental — in a word, masculine.” Ironically, the paint handling and compositions of the shows that first brought the artist to attention had such qualities — orgy scenes of well-bronzed young figures and self-portraits that accentuated her buxom features were suitably Rubeneque, in a highly kitsch way.

In compression of scale, however, Ms. Brown has begun to tap a genuinely precious seam of her own talent. Without losing the insolence that is essential to her aesthetic, she has painted a show of real gems. The tight scale makes it harder for the artist to indulge her tendency towards slick mimesis, energizing the work with an enriching awkwardness. This comes out, for instance, in the treatment of space in “Snack Time” (all 2008), in which a child sits at Saarinen’s Tulip table with an English Bull Terrier nestling up to him while a French bulldog looks on: all the postures and expression — canine and childish — are perfectly caught in this reduced space.

In “Mother’s Bathroom” two teenage girls try on make up while perched on the edge of a tub. Their intertwined, spindly legs have a soft floppiness more akin to Ms. Harkness’s mannerist figuration than Ms. Brown’s habitual soft-core photorealism.

“A Pink Rocker” plays odd games with scale as an Asian woman with an occidental child on her lap sits in what is probably the child’s chair in a distant room, a toy filled cot dominating the foreground and adding further confusion to the varying head sizes.

There is still plenty that is obnoxious and meretricious about these pictures: Neither Ms. Brown nor her champions would want it otherwise. But even in the most self-consciously “decadent” Fragonardian painting, “A Young Girl’s Room,” in which a Chloe Sevigny-like adolescent with dreamy limbs frolics with a Highland Terrier, the play of different lights, textures, and perspective has more to do with the dynamics of facture – getting stuff down in limited space – than with detached style games. It makes for a rich painterly experience.

Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 15, 2008 under the heading “Gallery Going:  In Defense of Painting”

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Even for seasoned navigators, there’s a lot of getting lost to be done in Miami, with everything oriented NE, NW, condo towers being built everywhere blocking one-way streets. Looking for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) near downtown, we first passed a group of boxy nightclub buildings. These are the after-hours places, which pick up the crowds after South Beach closes down at 4 am. Even at 3 in the afternoon, there was still a crowd of glazed ravers lined up, waiting to get in.

Then, like a mirage, emerged CIFO’s glass mosaic façade, a free-standing converted warehouse on North Miami Avenue. Seen from a distance, the pixilated Bisazza tiles make up an image of a bamboo jungle, the conception of architect Rene Gonzalez. (The benefactor, Ella Fontanals Cisneros, is a Venezuelan real-estate developer on a mission to promote Latin American contemporary artists.) The exhibition, “Fortunate Objects: The Appropriated Object,” is first-rate, a succinctly curated affair that juxtaposes works by Ai Weiwei, Amelia Azcarate, Marcea Astorga, and others.

Next, off to Wynwood proper, to see the Rubell Family Collection. Opened in 1996, the 45,000 square foot former DEA confiscated goods warehouse looks unassuming, even drab, from the exterior. That only sets you up for a bigger surprise when you get inside. It’s a huge space, incredibly appointed, filled with first-rate examples of recent art. (For comparison, it’s about on the scale of New York’s Whitney Museum.). I was blown away. This is the last signifying frontier of private wealth in action. There’s a 40,000-volume art library behind glass in a room with no one in it, a New Media room, a Phaidon bookstore with volumes extending dramatically to the ceiling, a Cerealart gift shop and a new sculpture garden with monumental works by Thomas Schutte. Two exhibitions there were especially strong, a survey of Hernan Bas (b. 1978) who studied in Miami and “Euro-Centric, Part 1,” featuring Thomas Zipp, Urs Fisher and others.

Trying for a trifecta, I embarked for the nearby Martin Margolis Collection, hearing that it had installations by Olafur Eliasson and Anthony McCall. I circled the block, but couldn’t find it. Instead, I spotted a handmade sign, made of paper, advertising a temporary show by Mike Cloud. This turned out to a makeshift outpost of New York’s Max Protetch gallery in a rented retail space. Cloud’s assemblage art inside gives new meaning to “slacker”-ism, raising crappy-looking to unimagined heights. The gallery assistant told me that the Margolis warehouse was indeed next door, but closed early at 4 pm. Closed early? On the Saturday of Art Basel Miami Beach? That’s nuts.

I wanted to see the Peter Coffin show at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. The Paris-based operation was one of the more visible presences at the fair (it even publishes its own art magazine, BING, to promote its artists). They have opened a permanent space in Wynwood, impressive in its scale and ambition. Coffin is a New York phenom, whose smart neo-conceptual works were to be seen all over the fair. His show, with the fractured title Model of the Universe (e.g. sweet harmonica solo, e.g. the idea of the sun, e.g. frisbee dog c included one of the weekend’s most impressive pieces, a steel spiral staircase twisted into a continuous circle: Tthink MC Escher’s impossible stairways to infinity meets a DNA double helix meets utilitarian found object.

One thing that’s great about Wynwood is—unlike New York’s West Chelsea or Bowery gallery districts—it’s still genuinely gritty. The cross-cultural juxtaposition with what’s going on in the surrounding neighborhood is so strong that it creates shocking 21st Century frisson. On SE Fifth Avenue, for example, is a colorful strip of ethnic fashion stores, in case the likes of Peter Coffin need to buy a sequined prom tuxedo—or some human hair.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

“The Art Miami fair has redefined itself,” explains Eli Ridgeway, of Paule Anglim, San Francisco, of the original fair that preceded Art Basel and the legion spin off fairs.  “Here galleries are showing new works in a historical context.” This means cutting-edge galleries such as Chinablue, Beijing, can cross-contextualize with established programs of New York galleries.

Chinablue, Beijing, mounted an impressive wall-sized photo mural by Wang Qingsong, showing the interior of a vast warehouse with hand-painted employment posters papered from floor to ceiling. I engaged gallery employee U Han to tell me about her experiences here. At first, she was shy, but once she got talking about how Qingsong makes his elaborate photo set-ups, she wouldn’t stop talking.

Bjorn Wetterling, who has run a leading contemporary gallery in Stockholm for 29 years, devoted his entire booth to a multi-layered photographic mixed media installation by New York twin brothers Doug & Mike Starn. He told of how he decided to participate. “I was not supposed to do the fair,” he told me, “because I was already in the photo fair. But they kept calling me, begging and begging. Finally, I was in Malaysia—and they called me late in the evening. I told them, ‘I have an extraordinary idea.’” And that’s how the Starns show was born.

New York gallerist Alexander Gray is featuring confrontational works by Kathe Burkhart (“Up Your Ass”, from the Liz Taylor series) and Cary Leibowitz (the artist formerly known as “Candyass”). His booth’s exterior has a Karen Finley piece consisting of a blank wall with Sharpie markers for people to write their mother’s maiden names (by the time I saw it, it was already completely covered). I asked Gray if his fares shocked anyone. He told me, “No, it’s not possible to scandalize any more.” Of the Finley, he said, “the public has been incredibly engaged in this monument to matriarchy.” Gray’s painting program is really interesting, as well, as it includes 1970s-era abstract works by Jack Whitten as well as contemporary offerings from Jo Baer and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Meanwhile, young artist Crystal Kanney drove “all through the night” from Savannah, Ga., to attend—and to wear her full-body Elvis suit, a kind of self-promoting art billboard.

Next, I headed back to Miami Beach, as I still hadn’t seen the “containers,” metal shipping units fashioned into galleries for Art Basel Miami’s Art Positions section. (This means, sadly, I had missed Iggy Pop’s performance Wednesday night).

By the time I got there, it was after nightfall. I had yet to see the ocean, so I wandering alone down the vast expanse of empty beach, gazing up at the illuminated million dollar condos and stars above. As you approach Art Positions, it sounds like a party, thanks to WPS1.org’s radio DJ booth and booming sound system.

The containers fair is hilarious. Stoned-looking gallerists slouch in their expensive clothes in inexpensive beach chairs as legions of curious unfatigable visitors troop through, jamming themselves into these brightly-lit air-conditioned shoeboxes.

I could hear the sounds of Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC coming from the central bar area next door. Curious, I wandered over toward the colored lights and fog machines. Under pop graphic signage by Ryan McGinness and a giant video screen featuring assume vivid astro focus’s neo-psychedelia was a plywood skateboard ramp with a demo going on. For myself, having spent this past late August skating at Owl’s Head skateboard park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, preparing for the “Old Man’s Bowl Jam,” I was intensely curious. Turns out, this was Art Radio WPS1.org’s “Concrete Waves: Homage to Skate Culture at Art Positions.”

A strange figure, with flowing dreadlocks and a sweat-drenched plaid shirt, carved elegant kickturns from side to side of the elongated half-pipe. I did a slow burn. It was Tony Alva, legendary 1970s cult hero, Z-Boy of Santa Monica Dogtown renown, the inventor of pool riding and the frontside aerial. For the first time since arriving in Miami, I was genuinely star-struck.

I approached him afterwards, told him how closely I had studied his pictures in Skateboardermagazine in the 1970s (this was before I started reading Art in America). He was gracious, but physically spent (he’s now 50 years old!). He autographed a paper Ryan McGinness skateboard deck for me. Finally, I could go back to New York satisfied.

It was time to hit the party circuit, off to the Belle Island apartment of collectors Alfred Gillio and Paul Berstein for an exclusive soiree for Art Basel Miami’s Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. But that’s another story…

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6

After the glamour, glitz and polish of Art Basel Miami, the Pulse fair seems funky, almost shabby, by comparison. That’s good. It gets you rooting for the underdog.

The Pulse fair, having built its reputation in a tent in years past, has moved to a Deco-era concrete warehouse with adjoining sculpture courtyard. (The outdoor pieces include a working one-man submarine by Duke Riley, the Brooklyn artist who was arrested last summer as a would-be terrorist for impinging on the water-space of the Queen Mary 2, docked off of Red Hook.) Here, hipsters milled about aimlessly, while bigger fish arrived in black limos and yellow pedicabs.

I had talked to Pulse participant Magda Sawon, director of New York’s Postmasters, at the David Yurman/Whitney Museum party the night before. She was super-enthusiastic, saying the fair had great energy and brisk commercial action. Upon arriving, that mood was palpable, as gallerists enjoyed free beer being doled out from a galvanized metal wash tub of ice on a rolling dolly.

Postmasters, true to its politically-conscious program, was showing an outrageous video by Kenneth Tin Kin Hung, “Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People,” which included, among other photo-collaged imagery, a tableau of Condoleezza Rice riding a giant turd above the capitol city.

For people who hadn’t yet realized that buying art is a form of shopping, Jonathan Seliger’s editioned bronze Gucci shopping bag at Jack Shainman, New York, brought the point home with post-Duchampian panache.

An engaging wall of big buttons with slogans at Catharine Clark, San Francisco, [photo 5655] turned out to be by artist Walter Robinson. I queried, did this mean the return of Walter Robinson, now editor of Artnet magazine? (His paintings from the era of his showing at Metro Pictures in the 1980s have since gained a cult following.) No, an exasperated Clark responded, there is anotherWalter Robinson, in California, now making art.

I ran into veteran independent gallerist Paul Morris at the booth of Bischoff/Weiss, London, showing the work of Olivier Millagoul. When he struck up a conversation, the two young partners asked him who he was. He produced a card, and pronounced, “I founded the Armory show.”[photo 5673] For me, having attended the first New York alternative art fair at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I knew his history. But I wondered how amazing it must be for him to think that he, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land and Matthew Marks dreamed up this whole fun art fair movement—the nonstop moveable feast—and look where we are today.

Upstairs from Pulse is a highly appealing mini-fair, GEISAI. It was founded in 2001 by the artist-led enterprise Kaikai Kiki, brainchild of Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami. In it, individual artists are given booths from which to present a one-person show. Most were there, on site, to further engage the public. Some 20 international artists were selected by a jury from a pool of 716 applicants.

I ran into painter Charles Clough, a familiar figure from the New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, who has since moved to Rhode Island. He told me, “I did my last show with Tricia Collins in 1998. When she closed, I went out with the tide.” He has published a compelling book for the event,Pepfog Clufff, which displays methods of rephotographing painting details to develop a new working language (a project he began in 1976). So, how was the fair going? “It’s funny running into a lot of people from the past 35 years I’ve been amongst in the artworld,” he told me. “But,” he continued wistfully, “I’m still waiting for the ‘legendary sales’ to start.”

By contrast, two booths down, Eric Doeringer was having the opposite experience. He makes small knock-offs of well-known works by art stars—and sells them for $250 apiece (usually on the streets of West Chelsea). How were sales for him? “Fantastic,” he gushed, “like nobody’s business.” He told me that he had brought “four gigantic suitcases full of works, a few hundred.” He says his best sellers are Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Rob Pruitt’s panda.

Around the corner was a wall-mounted flat screen TV featuring Walter Robinson talking (he’s one of the GEISAI jurors). But was this the real Walter Robinson?

I left, battling insane traffic, to get to the hotel fairs at South Beach, along Collins Avenue.

There were literally throngs of art soldiers and fabulous trophy specimens to be seen crowding the overflowing hotel lobbies. At the Dorset, hosting the flow fair, an exhibitionistic DJ Hottpants [photo 5687] was spinning CDs (I didn’t know they “spun”) in front of a garish painting. At the bar, a youthful hustler approached two young females. His pick-up line: “I’m surprised to see two cute girls here. I thought it would just be ‘artsy’ types.”

I ventured across Collins Avenue, dodging Lamborghinis and Bentleys, to go to the Red Dot fair at the South Seas hotel. Here, a few quality galleries had decamped in their rooms with surprisingly esoteric works. At Howard Yazerski, Boston, I saw beautiful paintings by Cologne’s Peter Tollens. At Brian Gross, San Francisco, there were exquisite historical works on paper by Richard Pousette-Dart. New York gallery Anita Shapolsky, which specializes in artists who were represented in the 1940s and 1950s by Martha Jackson Gallery and Betty Parsons Gallery, had brought unusual small works by Buffie Johnson, Ernest Briggs and others.

I came away thinking there might be a true heart and soul art community here somewhere—even on Collins Avenue.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6 – BREAKFAST TIME

At the Vicente restaurant this morning, a Spanish joint on Collins Avenue, I ran into Paul Ha, a familiar face from his time running White Columns in New York, who has since decamped to St. Louis to run the Contemporary Art Museum.

Paul had befriended a young artist from Washington, D.C., Adam DeBoer, 23, exhibiting his figurative paintings at the booth of his home city’s Conner Contemporary Art at the Go Go Art Projects section of the Pulse Fair. It’s “like a farm team,” DeBoer explained. He was riding high, as he had sold his largest work the night before. “It’s the first painting I ever sold,” he told me. “It was wild out there. A buying frenzy. Red stickers all over the walls after only four hours.”

This was the youthquake I had been warned of. “Aren’t you worried about pushing out all the mid-career artists?” I asked. “No,” he replied, he was only worried about “burning out at an early age.” I told him, “Move to New York.”

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5

The Art Basel Miami Beach fair at the Convention Center opened at noon sharp, with a literal rush through the gates. (Think Aqueduct Raceway, but with stiletto heels, not horseshoes.)  Inside was a glittering spectacle of art and excess, laid out with impeccable Swiss style.

To the left of the entrance, at the booth of Deitch, N.Y., the first painting that viewers saw was Kurt Kauper’s “Bobby 3,” a full-length realistic portrait of the Boston Bruin hockey great Bobby Orr, nude. The funny thing was, instead of looking like Orr, the figure resembled Kauper’s rival painter John Currin.

Also near the entrance was an impressive installation by Christof Buchel at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. It was culled from the artist’s recent debacle (cancelled show) at Mass MoCA, consisting of metal storage container with a ladder leading to a make-shift roof deck. Mounting this structure, one could see the trashy leavings of a kids’ pizza party—Jello coagulating, half-consumed Kool Aid, etc, with an official US Army 750 lb. “leaflet bomb” hanging above. Looking through the Gauntanamo Bay-style cyclone fencing, viewers could then survey the entire fair.

Two booths chose retail themes: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, fixtured to look like a Prada store, and, at Shanghart, Shanghai, a full-blown convenience store, with external street façade. There, outside, a woman told her friend that she had just sent her boyfriend inside to “buy condoms.”

Among the early VIP attendees, competitive buying was fierce. At Gladstone’s booth, a woman was looking at a Richard Prince painting, “My Life as a Weapon,” 2007, which has a joke text painted in blue and black over a grid of color porn magazine photos. Turning to her husband, she said, “This is your thing. The fact that you don’t own this is terrible.”

I also heard the whispering murmurs among gallery employees, “the Kapoor just sold.”

Mary Boone’s booth was true to her 1980s West Broadway glory days: Barbara Kruger, Ross Bleckner, a large group of new Eric Fischls, “Scenes from Late Paradise” (sold already, together, according to Ron Warren, the longtime public face of the gallery).

Speaking of Mary Boone, I was surprised to see a painting by her wunderkind noir photorealist Damian Loeb at Acquavella’s. The Color of Money (2007) shows a house on a darkened street.

“How much is that painting,” a woman demanded.

“It’s sold,” a gallerist informed her.

“Do you have another?”

“We have another work, but it’s of another subject.”

“How much was this one?”

“$80,000.”

Then, the woman exclaimed, “That’s my house. That’s my house. That’s the house I grew up in.”

Sighted: Author Tom Wolfe, in trademark white suit, greeting well-wishers with his skull-cracked smile… New York art consultant Kim Heirston, elegantly educating her clients (and, no, she was not the tallest woman there—in the context of this XL Germanic crowd she is average height)… Brit scribe Anthony Haden-Guest looking pale-but-determined, notepad in hand… Talent scout Clarissa Dalrymple, puposeful in white cowboy boots… Miami’s own supercollectors Don and Mera Rubell, ever optimistic… 1980s East Village doyenne Gracie Mansion… OmnipresentArtforum publisher Knight Landsman in white suit and yellow tie (no doubt he has packed six such natty outfits)… 1980s art stars Doug Starn and Mike Starn looking smashing in matching frayed denim jeans and hair gone gray… New York painter Melissa Meyer (a friend, at last)…

Overheard: A woman complains to her female companion, “I can’t find anything to buy for $15,000.” Another man scolds a dealer, “Call us when the dollar gets stronger.”

Two observations: When it comes to art fairs, there is no such thing as fatigue. Also, after about four hours, everyone starts to look familiar (you begin to “know” the characters).

Finally, I was actually looking for art, paintings in particular. Some notable examples:

At Paula Cooper’s, Dan Walsh’s Pass (2007) consists of horizontal violet bands stacked upon a white background to buzzy hypnotic effect.

Kai Althoff’s dispersion work of blocky forms on cloth, created a gentle play on the optic relationship between gray and red, at Barbara Gladstone’s booth.

At Hetzler’s of Berlin, Arturo Herrera’s acrylic on felt work looked like a Robert Moskowitz in its silhouetted reduction—and was set up against a recent Bridget Riley.

At Michael Werner, New York, a self-contained Sigmar Polke room was installed with four fantastic ghostlike figure-ground abstractions (all sold as a set, at $5 million, a prospective buyer was informed).

Anselm Reyle, the hottest young abstractionist of the moment, had a sexy/decadent purple mylar-on-violet painted canvas work, encased in lucite box, at L & M, New York (marked sold, with a red dot at $250,000).

A new Baselitz “Remix” cowboy (!) painting (image right-side up) at Ropac, Salzburg, looking fresh and neo-Richard Prince.

Brooklyn’s own Pop Tantric Chris Martin with two forceful works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Lydia Dona, recombinant and delirious, a large diptych with engine parts outlined over shimmering silver, to the electronic soundtrack of the Dino Bruzzone piece next to it, at Karpio, San Jose.

Fabian Maracaccio and Jonathan Lasker, masters of mutant formalism and extruded brushstroke, facing off at Schulte, Berlin.

Kate Shepherd’s Pewter, American, Death, Revere (2007), white interstices of geometric netting undulating against a graphite ground, with elegant contained light, at New York’s Galerie Lelong.

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Chie Fueki: “Lucky, Star, Super, Hero”
Mary Boone
9 September-21 October 2006

Pop appropriation meets eroticism in the work of Liu Ye and Kyung Jeon. These artists remind us of the persistence of sexuality throughout East Asian art. Along with Chie Fueki’s large, busy, and heavily textured paintings of psychedelically decorated athletes in cubistic action poses currently on display at Mary Boone, these artists are linked by their use of allegory.

Liu Ye uses a cartoon persona to unsettle the viewer. He does what many fine artists do with mass media imagery; he put it in a high art context through technique and compositional devices. Kyung Jeon fills his paintings with cartoonish male and female characters that run amok in their undies. Both artists sexualize child-like figures. The large, busy, and heavily textured paintings are quilt like accumulations of sports related symbols. They employ a cubistic formalist structure. Considering these exhibitions, it is clear that allegory or expression by means of symbolic actions and figures is integral to these artists’ oeuvre.

The catalog indicates that Mr. Ye was drawn into the world of art when he read classic fairy tale collections by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as a boy. However his work attempts to replace the clear cut moral dichotomies present in such tales with an art world staple, ambiguity.

Liu Ye appropriates the image of Dick Bruna’s Miffy the girl rabbit in five of the paintings in this exhibition. Like many contemporary artists he recontextualizes popular imagery in a high art context. Seeing Miffy rendered in acrylic and oil paint in such paintings as “Lost Miffy” (2006) is different from seeing the simplified form of Miffy on the television. Ye reclaims the ubiquitous cartoon character for his own purposes. Does Miffy represent something, fallen innocence say, or is Ye simply borrowing, like Warhol and many others after him, cultural icons in order to draw attention to the work without having to reinvent the wheel? Ye exploits Miffy’s anthropomorphic qualities. We read Miffy as a lost child and the delicate rendering of the girl rabbit’s fur lends the image a certain pathos. A particularly unnerving example of this can be found in “Temptress” (2006). In this painting Liu Ye does a portrait of Miffy dressed in a school girl’s outfit. Certainly there is a perverse element present in a painting that combines a baby rabbit that preschoolers are familiar with and the notion of a temptress. But in reality isn’t the image of Miffy used to lure children, to get them to watch more television and to purchase Miffy products?

Ye wants to recontextualize the familiar, but these paintings also have a strong formal quality to them. They are very stripped down, for the most part using only two or three compositional elements, especially the rectangle within the rectangle format. In paintings such as “Boogie Woogie, little girl in New York” (2005) and “Once upon a time in Broadway” (2006) Ye appropriates Mondrian’s compositions. What are we to make of the bringing together of Miffy, a cartoon little girl, and Piet Mondrian? Are the figures of Miffy and the little girl to be seen as little more than forms and colors playing off of other forms and colors or does Ye hope that these iconic images will tap into some deep psychological reservoir? It could be a lament for high modernism which has been replaced by postmodern pluralism (Yves Klein’s “International Blue” is referenced in one painting), but often the juxtaposition seems more eccentric than thought provoking. Mr. Ye is trying to tell a story, a narrative (“Once upon a time…”) filled with opaque symbols.

Ye uses two abstract and cartoonish female forms recurrently. Both have disproportionately large heads, but the “little girl” character is stocky and almost looks like a standing rectangle with a rounded top, while the pre-pubescent character is highly fetishized and relates directly to the female characters found in anime. The green skirt, red bowtie in the hair, and bowl shaped hairdo of the little girl are cultural signs, and the exaggeratedly emaciated form of the teenage girl, is an example of an erotic shorthand, because all of the messy things like bone structure, bodily blemishes, and of course body fat are absent, but Ye makes sure to include porcelain white and delicate skin tones, bright red lipstick, bright red nipples (“Night” (2005)), and heavily rouged cheeks. The egg shaped heads on these potentially pedophilic caricatures and the long distance between their eyes and eyelashes makes them doll like and alien. Compared to the sexualization of children one finds on MTV and assorted TV commercials for products aimed at teens this stuff seems innocent, but it is clear that Ye is able to generate eroticism from unsettlingly weird and nubile female caricatures. Is he titillated or manipulative? It is hard to say.

In “Banned Books” (2006), a young girl delves into the pages of an adult book perhaps for the first time. Ye focuses are attention on the softness and sensuality of the girl’s long straight black hair and the way it is pulled back over her shoulders. She is viewed as a sexual object exactly at the same moment she is becoming aware of her own sexuality.

In “Sword” (2001), two little uniformed girl characters face one another with swords drawn on opposite sides of a dreamy, spatially ambiguous landscape. Except for the fact that the tears rolling down their cheeks are shaped differently from one another they are mirror images. Does this stand-off represent the divided self, the history of Ye’s birthplace China, or a perpetual conflict of universal forces? Ye borrows the heavy symbolism of allegory in this painting, without providing a clear cut moral vision allegories normally have.

Kyung Jeon does delicate and technically impressive gouache and graphite compositions on rice paper, which consist of multi-figure action or battle scenes. These images bring the sort of life and death struggles that Hieronymus Bosch enjoyed illustrating to mind, but their playfulness is more reminiscent of the marginalia that Sergio Aragonés filled the pages of Mad Magazine with. Although the poses and actions of the figures in these paintings could represent different things — the battle of the sexes (“Joust Fight” [2006]), the life stages of woman (“On Motherhood” [2005]), and male sexuality (“Peek” [2005]), among others — they exude the lightness of an idyll but deal with serious stuff like sex, birth, and death. They are beautifully rendered microcosms populated by childlike brunette figures donning nothing but blue, red, and white loincloths. Whether a woman is using her animated and absurdly pendular breasts to threaten the people around her or a group of disgruntled looking cartoon males are poking their faces out of a giantesses’ extraordinarily long train of straight black hair, Jeon imagines males and females warring against one another, and humans blending with the animal realm, in an emotional and literal sense.

These groups of male and female figures form a symbolic nexus, in the sense that a battle of the sexes jousting tournament (“Joust Fight”) can only be read metaphorically, but there are many smaller actions going on within the larger conceptual whole. Jeon also tinges his child imagery with sexuality in such drawings as “Thumb Sucking” (2006). We see a beautifully rendered circular cluster of tiny flowers with little girl thumb suckers, their face, thumb in mouth, and hair, sprouting from it in several places. Again this fetishism is done in such a sweet and delicate way that it is hard to read it as a personal obsession. These drawings take on the air of the allegorical because the figures don’t have an individual character, and it is hard not to read them as symbolic types.

Chie Fueki’s mixed media paintings are chock full of emblems from sporting teams, predominantly football team logos like dolphins, cartoon lightning bolts, attacking eagles, and numbered jerseys. In the Blakean “Significant Moment” (2005-06), a football player descends from the heavens with rainbow colored spirals swirling all around him. In “Every Corner Runs Two Directions” (2006), sports team emblems and football player body parts spread across the surface along with innumerable asymmetrical geometric patterns. Although the competition between the fractured surfaces, varying textures, myriad colors, and plethora of outlines often undermines the complexity of these compositions, Ms. Fueki’s symbolic overload is definitely of the moment. These paintings bring the best known painter of sporting events to mind, LeRoy Neiman, such high art luminaries as William Blake and Chris Ofili, and the folk art of quilting. Fueki incorporates sports imagery into her work, which is rare in the art world. The exclusion of sports from the majority of the content of contemporary art is evidence that the art world’s insularity from the daily life of the masses is as strong as ever, regardless of the Pyrrhic victory of pluralism. The artist attempts to make these static, colorful, textured, and fragmented athletes and athletic equipment and uniforms that bring magical spells and pyrotechnics to mind go beyond the earthly realm.

Considering that organized sports replaced religious ritual many years ago, and also the fact that so much earlier art dealt with religious ritual, one would think more artists would explore the psychological and sociological implications of these highly fetishized events. Fueki’s pretty but diffuse mixed media paintings portray athletes and their regalia as enchanted objects, but their psychedelic aura undermines any potential emotional content.

A version of this review was first published in the New York Sun on October 12, 2006

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