November 15 – December 22, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

In her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W., “Will She Ever Shut Up?”, Betty Tompkins, ever the bold tinkerer and experimenter, finds ingenious new ways to speak her mind. The formal link between three rooms of stylistically diverse, modestly scaled artworks is Tompkins’ strategy of placing socially charged phrases – handwritten, stencil-lettered or directly painted – on top of a separate visual field. These pointed juxtapositions poke us to puzzle out the connections, to think through the implications.

In the first room Tompkins unfurls the latest chapter of “Women Words”, a series she began in 2002. These incorporate phrases by and about women the artist solicits from the public. Interspersed here are companion works derived from the #MeToo movement in a separate series she titles “Apologia,” directly quoting public statements made by prominent men accused of assaulting women. Both categories of text are cleverly applied onto book page reproductions of canonical images by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Gainsborough, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Ingres and Artemisia Gentileschi. For the acrylic paintings in the second gallery, all from this year, selected “Women Words” expressions and accounts overlay her signature monochrome airbrushed, gracefully cropped close ups of genitalia.

As a suffused, solemn backdrop for these timely new works, the third gallery presents her text-only paintings and drawings on paper from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Bringing to mind their on-going significance, Tompkins hand-copied fragments of our country’s founding legal documents painted in warm colonial hues over a subtle background grid of painted and penciled words. This group from the artist’s considerable archive is a reminder that her earliest, monumental paintings from 1969 through 1974, based on pornographic photographs her first husband had ordered illegally through the mail, were not shown for over 30 years. Since “discovered” in 2003, these and others Tompkins has since created have been shown virtually non-stop in museums and galleries around the world.

Perusing Tompkins’ word-image juxtaposition it is impossible not to think of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “L.H.O.O.Q,” (1919) created by doctoring a post-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. Duchamp’s sly pencil marks succinctly highlight gender ambiguity in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Likewise, Tompkins’ satiric defacement of historical masterworks allows us to scrutinize her repurposed works for lessons in identity formation and gender role definition. Her clustered expressions of scorn, praise, pride and contrition loosely hand lettered in opaque pink paint completely cover single figures in the reproductions of well-known paintings and photographs. The resulting frozen pastel silhouettes also call to mind another historic reference, the ancient catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. As with this end-of-days event, Tompkins’  verbal flows have seemingly stopped the solitary men and women in their tracks ensnaring them for our analysis. Notably, the artist reverses her formula in an outlier work installed on the gallery’s smaller foyer wall, Women Words (Anon #11) (2017). On this vintage photograph, rather than the figure it’s the rural background that is filled with hand painted crude expressions such as, “Bean flicker,” “flesh wallet,” “Hagia Sophia,” “Love Socket”, ”put a bag over her head and fuck her for old glory.”  The young woman is fully dressed but seated in a way that modestly displays her underclothing. Unlike the other 50 plus readymades in the show, this woman is fully visible. She appears protected from the insults by her self-esteem and safe within her self-knowledge—indeed, wearing a quiet Mona Lisa smile.

Naomi Wolf’s landmark book, “Vagina” (2012) explores the implications of new research on the neuroscience of women’s reproductive organs. We now know there are multiple direct nerve connections between these organs and the brain. Wolf discusses how the impact of physical and verbal abuse on women’s psyches can now be more precisely measured. She also presents important correlations between erotic pleasure and personal agency. Tompkins’ seven pale pink and blue-grey paintings in the second gallery combine two contrasting techniques. Her signature soft airbrushed compositions of the swooning folds and creases of a woman’s labia and clitoris are counterposed with hard-edged stencil letters that have been removed to reveal the artwork’s under painting. Despite having its origin in exploitative pornography, Tompkins’ gentle yet emphatically clinical presentation of women’s genitalia tells of the importance for women of having a full understanding of the workings of their own sexuality. Being aware of the profound positive power of full female sexual expression for both men and women is the best defense against the attitudes expressed in the crowd-sourced phrases and narratives “pressed” into the genitalia in Tompkins’ paintings. My ex’s favorite…(2018) perfectly portrays this dynamic by hypnotically balancing the work’s two compositional elements within its floating painted space.

Let me suggest one way to consider the show’s composite truth that listening to each other with mutual respect is vital to the survival of our country. Imagine a vocal performance based on all the artworks in this show, simultaneously read aloud by their original authors. Men’s and women’s voices would create a calibrated cacophony merging insults, confessions, revelations and apologies pertaining to the opposite sex. Next, the phrases from Tompkins’ history works with key fragments from our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be recited by male voices. In these works, there is an underlying grid of the single word, “law,” repeated in rows. This would become a chant demanding “Law, law, law, law…” performed in a long, slow crescendo by an all-female chorus in the tens of thousands echoing the recent women’s marches. This multilayered vocal performance would reply to the question in Tompkins’ title with a resounding and hope filled “No!”

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May 26 to June 25, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

Karen Arm burrows into essential formulae of nature. Her motifs have been few, but comprehensive: tree branches, water droplets, spider webs, smoke, stars, and waves. Or rather, her motifs are distilled from those sources, broken down into constants and variables. From here she reassembles a vision of nature truer than optical transcription. Her spare, articulate images of restless seawater, for instance, probe beneath the surface, beyond the moment, to capture its fluid drapery. Her work bears superficial similarity to that of Vija Celmins, particularly the water images, but in contrast to photo-based drawings by the latter — uncanny ghosts which provide only the tease of nourishment — Arm really wants to shows us how water works.

There are two motifs in exclusive rotation at Arm’s current show at P.P.O.W.: “suns,” being centripetal accumulations of small circles into enormous ones; and “wavy rays,” in which numerous bendy lines radiate from a central point. The painting Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray on Brown Red) (all works 2016) is the best of an impressive bunch. Here the radiating line motif, flexible and exact, can be read as a gathered topknot of angel hair, perhaps, or the pulsating rings of a pebble dropped in a pond. If the exquisite dry precision of Arm’s works on paper often eclipses the glazed depths of her larger canvases, in this superb painting the layers of acrylic mix richly, projecting graphic energy forward with wriggling intensity. The complex method of Arm’s color is left for the viewer to contemplate on the dripped edges that fold back to the wall like photochemical rainbows at the bleeding margins of pre-digital art prints; here one sees that the painting’s basic two-color scheme is woven from many strands.

The wavy rays recall Bridget Riley’s Current, and thus of Philip Taaffe’s tribal re-enactments of her imagery. The central burst has also been a device of Mark Grotjahn and an occasional motif of James Siena and Marsha Cottrell. These artists, along with Daniel Zeller, Jacob El Hanani, the late Lori Ellison, and many other participants in the thriving afterlife of linear abstraction, think algorithmically to some extent — most notably Siena, whose gamesmanship is steadily electric. But to a greater extent than most of her peers, Arm is oriented toward the singular, concentrated image. Her true forbear may be Agnes Martin, whose horizontal lines hover above specificity, in search of pure spirit.

If picturing was anathema in a previous age of linear abstraction, artists working in that vein today take inoculating sips of scientific illustration, decorative and shamanic arts, Op and Pop, 19th-century engraving, the animism of Paul Klee, comics, comix, and other pathogens that the scrupulous Riley and the wise Martin steered clear of — as does Arm in her own way, her steely eye always striving to build a convincing image, not a quotation or diagram, out of persistent studio ritual. So it is with the second motif in the current show, the suns, which began some years ago, an order of magnitude more distant, as “globular clusters” — galactic-scaled works that were comparatively dispersed, pinprick stars against unknowable void. In the new work, we are far more quickly drawn into dense gravity. Incalculable accumulations of tiny, concentric bursts of color thicken, in some of them, to haptic hallucinations of pebbly skin or bubbling tissue at a thermonuclear center.

Biographical information is irrelevant to interpreting such formally driven work, but as Nancy Princenthal points out in her biography of Martin, it nevertheless helps to know that her subject grew up in the sere plains of Saskatchewan, and that she was at times overwhelmed by mental illness; perhaps for Martin (as for Ellison) the balm of abstraction was a vital necessity. Arm nowhere puts forward the fact in titles or press releases, but she is personally frank about a long and difficult fight with breast cancer, and it is hard not to see that the suns are breast-like, and subject to a cellular logic bound to run amok — the ineluctable logic of supernovae and black holes.

As serious as these works are — as obsessive, cosmic and, possibly, autobiographical — they are full of lively questions about color and touch, compositional freedom and strategy, and the contours of taste. Untitled (Yellow and Red Sun on Blue) pushes things almost too far, into an excessively hard-won illusion of sphericality. It is as gaudy as an encrusted Lucas Samaras box, and in its own remarkable way, as mystical and gorgeous.

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July 9 to  August 7, 2015
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

A perverse combination of BDSM homoerotic fantasies, ‘50s French poster graphics and modest quotidian moments marks Anthony Iacono’s debut exhibition. Together with two short, less than compelling Bruce Nauman-like videos, eighteen impeccably crafted collages of painted paper, mostly 24 by 19 inches done this year, were executed with a suave brio that belies their kinky preoccupations. I’m not sure whether Iacono’s delight in color, form, and composition camouflage his darker fetishist fascinations, or the other way around, but his jitterbug between form and content has a charming syncopated beat.

Though factually collages, by appearing like paintings, these works queer picture making, undermining and subverting expectations of how a conventional genre painting should behave. There are constant double-entendres humming through the work, from the obvious (Fruit) to the sly (Cantaloupe, Peach and Rug Burn). In this latter work the peaked slices of cantaloupe in a white bowl, rhyme with a negative space between a forearm and tricep. The peach-colored elbow bruise of a cropped figure resting his arms on a table echoes the blushing piece of fruit at his side, and implies a rough sexual encounter on the burn-inflicting, absent rug of the title. Even this show’s name, Crudités at Sunset, implies not only the early evening, pre-dinner nosh at a cocktail party, but in a larger sense, minor off-color behaviors in the twilight of the painting enterprise.

Fragments of bodies in these works mostly function, along with plants and fruit, as still life forms. A young male body, often in chaste white underpants and gym socks, becomes the center of erotic fascination, as in Hanging Plant where a potted begonia is suspended by a hook from the nipple of a bent over torso in white briefs that frames the scene. But in Shrimp Cocktail, where seven tiger-striped crustaceans dangle from a martini glass and, with a lemon, balance precariously on parallel, naked butt-cheeks, it is only our presupposition that the supine figure facing away from us is male.

On the other hand the pink-tipped large aubergine breasts that rest on a table like sharp knees and support a water-filled vial of daisies in the décolletage in Vase, are undeniably female. There is so much that is provocatively improper about this painting (including the rhyming yellow-nippled lemon shape protruding from the right), that the implied racial incorrectness involved in using dark-skinned tits as a carafe holder in some kind of disturbing bondage play shall almost go unremarked.

Screen-based reproductions of his work fail to convey the nuances of Iacono’s process. Each colored area seems to have been separately cut from painted paper and then pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. The surfaces therefore have a subtle relief, which produces sharply defined edges, and avoids the painterly conundrum of deciding how to handle the interaction where two colored shapes meet. This could result in a conventional modernist flatness, but the shapes, shaded and highlighted with such a light touch of the airbrush, or cut perspectivally, tend to carve out a shallow space and create a point of view that implies psychological content. There are of course echoes of Mattise cut-outs in this, and it is also similar to the way David Salle’s recent large paintings were collaged together from painted pieces of canvas. Iacono’s work is much more pristine than Salle, but it made me curious how these might look if they were much larger, attached to canvas, and not under glass.

This exhibition makes a good case for Iacono’s place in the burgeoning group of painters investigating the abstract pictorial properties of representation. Of course these paintings have roots in the work of several older artists. The stylized hair and drawing in a particular piece, Bag, depicting a wide hipped, jaundiced female back and arm, brought Alexi Worth to mind. Nevertheless Iacono’s sarcastic wit and stylish execution evidence a unique sensibility. This is an impressive first show.

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October 13th to November 12, 2011
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-647-1044

Lynne Yamamoto is one of the two female artists with solo-shows on view at P.P.O.W, continuing the gallery’s trend of exhibiting mid-career women this season, beginning with Martha Wilson’s “I have become my own worst fear.”  Katherine Kuharic’s series “Pound of Flesh” showcases her signature collages and oil paintings.  Particularly resonant commentaries on consumerism today, her works recall the pop art of Tom Wesselman and Richard Hamilton.  A smaller, more private gallery is devoted to Yamamoto’s hauntingly austere works.  Born and raised in Hawaii, much of the artist’s oeuvre speaks to the implications of nationality and culture in shaping identity.  Titled “Genteel,” Yamamoto’s minimal and monochromatic exhibition houses only two projects: Insect Immigrants, After Zimmerman (1948) Hawaii, 2009-11 and the sculpture Grandfather’s Shed, 2008-10.

Insects are a reoccurring device in Yamamoto’s work.  Often employed to speak to issues of seriality and taxonomy, they are used here to examine the complexity of Hawaiian nativity.  Insect Immigrants consists of a collection of found white doilies, each hand embroidered with a different insect and displayed to face the wall, making visible the painstaking production of each loop and knot.  Yamamoto’s exposure of her elaborate process speaks to the complex construction of Hawaiian identity with its multi-ethnic population.  Much like the identity of Hawaiian immigrant people, each work in her series is unique, yet forcibly classified, titled with the embroidered insect’s scientific name.

Yamamoto’s handmade pieces are clustered and suspended using black insect pins, originally intended for mounting and displaying real beetles and butterflies.  Here, the pins are used to draw the doilies away from the gallery wall, casting dramatic shadows. The installation almost appears to glow from within, the visual impact of the 78 insect immigrants alluding to the effectiveness of a critical mass.  Within the group, however, there is a painstaking allegiance to individuality, the personal identity of each insect crafted by hand upon a vintage doily, itself imbued with a lengthy history.

A statement from P.P.O.W references the arrival of American missionaries to Hawaii in the early 1800s who established plantations that drew waves of immigrants.  This immigrant presence has had a lasting effect on the ethnic diversity, and in turn the collective identity, of the state.  Yamamoto’s title, Insect Immigrants, After Zimmerman (1948) Hawaii, refers to a 1948 scientific volume compiled by Elwood C. Zimmerman, an entomologist who catalogued all Hawaiian insect fauna including over 5,000 insects native to the state.  This metaphor of a native species serves to inform the larger dialogue of nationality in a place with such a complex cultural identity.

The fragility of Yamamoto’s doilies is countered by the stoic impenetrability of her marble sculpture, Grandfather’s Shed.  Displayed on a pedestal in the corner of the gallery, the small relic is a markedly more personal commentary on cultural identity, paying tribute to Yamamoto’s own family history.  The work is subtitled Lana’i City, Island of Lana’I and memorializes her grandfather’s humble woodshop, originally constructed from scavenged materials.  The sculpture was produced through a 3D scan of a hand-made positive, then hand-detailed by the artist from memory.  The shed is rendered in what appears to be realistic detail, with a dented roof and gaps in the siding where the wooden panels have come away from the frame.  The permanence of the material is heightened by the solidity of the work itself– all doors and windows have been closed off, affording no transparency or view of the interior.

By implementing distinctly European methods of construction, both with her embroidery and marble sculpture, Yamamoto makes reference to a western identity, and perhaps her current positioning as an immigrant.  Interested in the visual signifiers that constitute cultural identity, Yamamoto highlights the very slips and contradictions that contribute to the plurality of the self.

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This image was featured in the June 2010 listings

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“Julie Heffernan: New Paintings” at P.P.O.W until November 8 (555 W. 25th Street, second Floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-647-1044).

“Laura Harrison: Building Portraits: Surface and Space in Landmark Structures” at PSCA until November 1 (86 Walker Street, Sixth Floor, between Broadway and Lafayette Streets, 646-613-1252).

There is a noble tradition of Bad painting with a capital “B.” It is a modern spin on mannerism: Instead of merely accenting their work with distortions of perspective, color, composition, and so forth, some artists attempt to will themselves into a state of ineptitude. A noble tradition, and Julian Schnabel does not belong to it.

There are basically two branches of Bad: the anal and the incontinent. Artists of the first variety ape the hackneyed horrors of Sunday painters and thrift-store finds, and are essentially conceptual in their iconoclastic intent; Francis Picabia and John Currin are Bad painters of this stripe. Those of the second are more ambitious, expressive, and risky. (Sloppy-joe messiness is more ambitious because, beyond kindergarten, excesses with paint tend only to occur in a fine-art context. Mind-boggling meticulousness, by contrast, is a defining characteristic of Outsider art.)

The masters of fast-and-loose Badness are artists who have entered their “old-age style”: Painters such as Picasso and Philip Guston were proven masters before electing to become desperados. Like clowning, the appearance of goofiness requires a special kind of control.

However much Julian Schnabel seems to aspires to the beastly sublime, it is painfully apparent with his latest show of lethargic, gratuitously outsized doodles that he is merely bad with a forlorn, bedraggled, lower-case “b.” In his handling of the genre, neo-expressionism has ceased to have any vitality or purpose. It has become, like cigarette smoking, a pathetic and outdated habit.

PaceWildenstein, at its Chelsea premises, are showing five of Mr. Schnabel’s recent “Indian” paintings -based on turn-of-the-20th-century portraits of native chiefs – and half a dozen gargantuan sculptures of the 1980s. Though the latter take up more space, and are greviously unoriginal in the faux-dionysian bravura, they are somehow less offensive. Totemic turds crudely pierced with found-object heads and limbs have been done already, and far more convincingly, in the sumptuously primitive sculptures of Cy Twombly and Joan Miró. But any 13-foot tall patinated bronze of vaguely archetypal shape and rough surface will make an impression. Not so smeared paint.

On every inch of his canvases, some of which stretch up to 9-feet high, Mr. Schnabel indulges in a hubris he wouldn’t tolerate from himself or his minions in a single frame of his finely crafted movies. (“Basquiat,” 1996, and “Before Night Falls,” 2000, are the pictures this artist should want to be remembered by). His new paintings revisit territory more than amply explored by Mr. Schnabel’s superiors in the neo-expressionist camp, namely Malcolm Morley and Georg Baselitz.

To explain what’s wrong with Mr. Schnabel’s paintings, it is not enough to say, for instance, that the drawing is limp and illustrative: Those are precisely the kind of dubious intentions and calculated strategies that, when purposive and thought through, can be interesting. Genuine mannerism is about testing endurances, twisting language, pushing against medium, and then suddenly capitulating to it. It’s about really good painting that goes bad, or vice versa.

Mr. Schnabel gives himself nothing to resist (not even some smashed up crockery, as in his trademark early paintings). He splurges blobs of paint over an underlying sketch that is itself nothing but a splurge. There is no push-pull between quality and mediocrity because with him it’s all the latter. He is like a B-movie karate-fighter kicking at an open door.

***

There is welcome relief just across the street at P.P.O.W. Julie Heffernan is a “natural mannerist” – an oxymoron, of course, because mannerism is per se unnatural. Forced, stylized, strategic, and effect-driven, it exploits the received rather than the discovered. Yet within Ms. Heffernan’s camp idiom, she achieves genuine intensity and richness of expression.

In this show, her third at the gallery, her technique is dazzling in a modern-academic kind of way. “Self-Portrait as Agnostic II” (2003), for instance, is a tour de force in its handling of reflections in a polished floor and a warped antique mirror. This may be John Koch rather than Velázquez, but Koch is a good place to start.

Technique is inconsequential if not harnessed to vision; Ms. Heffernan’s most marvelously is. In golden, glowing aristocratic interiors that date anywhere from the High Renaissance to the Rococo, mysterious dramas are played out: Gorgeously attired ladies spontaneously combust, birds descend in flocks, alchemical landscapes sprout from bedsheets.

All Ms. Heffernan’s paintings announce themselves as self-portraits. They are also allegories of sorts, engendering dialogue between touch and self, consciousness and imagination, style and expressivity. Best of all, Ms. Heffernan has the quirkiness of magical realism without the sordid silliness of so much latter-day surrealism. With her, mannerism is definitely a price worth paying.

***

Laura Harrison’s debut show at the offbeat Tribeca loft gallery of Paul Sharpe is a must-see. She, too, is a mannerist of sorts, eking out poignancy and nostalgia in the very act of painting. In thrall to vintage photographs, especially those of destroyed buildings (such as the old Penn Station) or Venetian palazzos, she plays the painterly alienation card like an old violin. Her images, sparsely painted with a dry brush, bear a strong resemblance to those of the British painter, Merlin James, while a sense of the precarious and the ephemeral ties her to Belgian Luc Tuymans. She also looks to respective forebears of these two artists, Sickert and Hammershøi.

But Ms. Harrison already has a voice of her own. Although some unresolved experiments in larger scale and crudely shaped canvases mar this selection, a group of six medium-sized canvases in the gallery’s inner sanctum is profoundly moving. These have the delicate, knowing slightness of Elizabeth Peyton’s portraiture. Not despite but because of their fragility and seeming inconsequence, they are real tear-jerkers.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 23, 2003

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By DREW LOWENSTEIN

In his second solo exhibition at PPOW gallery, James Esber continues to pull, ply and distort sexist and racist hate images culled from popular American sources. But this time a more subtle use of these taboo subjects operates as they intrude, creep into and subvert America’s most beloved images.

Riffing off Norman Rockwell and late-1960’s doe-eyed figurines, Esber spins grotesque, trippy amalgams on canvas and in plasticine wall adhesions. In BOYS’ CLUB, a Rockwellian group of youths merge into a torqing mass of conjoined quadruplets. Close inspection reveals fingerprints left in the wake of the artist’s pummeling the now writhing plasticine relief. Another platicine piece titled I WUV U consists of a flayed, splayed and stretched version of these beloved 99-cent shop figurines. It is as if a cartoon steamroller or a Mr. Bill episode left behind this figural panoramic road kill.

Esber turns from bold plasticine modeling to bravura brushwork and electric color in the paintings on canvas. In RABBIT TALK, a distended lipped, Tom/Huck like little tramp innocently bends toward a rabbit as, unbeknownst to him, his body unfurls in a eruptive rush of dropped trousers, sprouting limbs, breasts, high heeled leather boots, and exposed genitalia. SELF PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FOURSOME offers a similarly sympathetic boy, this time hunched and writing at a desk, tongue pointed in concentration. Underneath the surface of the desk, Esber hits below the belt with an image of copulation that grows like fungi off gnarled tree bark. Like a Peter Saul composition or Ivan Albright decompositions, there’s plenty for viewers to occupy themselves with here. Try to find and count the variety and number of feet twisting in a single figure or watch a lock of hair morph into an eviscerated intestine. Esber seems to collaborate with himself as each exquisite corpse in this exhibition floats in an exuberant flight of fancy, celebrating the orgasmic multiplicity of freedom while indexing the perversions of repression, objectification and self-loathing.

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