Quick Hits: Jessie Edelman @ Denny Dimin; Greg Burak @ Fortnight Institute; "Vanitas" @ Nathalie Karg; Ross Simonini @ anonymous: &c
Reviews in a few sentences (more or less)
Jessie Edelman’s “Getaway” (Denny Dimin until Feb. 26) is a vacation for the eyes in which colorful, ornate borders contain landscapes cum still-lifes alive with painterly brushstrokes. The large oil paintings—seven in all, all 2021—eschew human subjects yet are alive with fruit, foliage, and flowers, like a Freilicher.
Verdict: ****.5 / *****
Greg Burak came onto my radar via my mailbox (The New York Review of Books November 18 issue). His second show at Fortnight Institute, “Associates” (until Feb. 13), reads like one uncanny story told through a series of eight portraits of muted, earthy tones and flat scenes of a mundane, Lynchian drama.
Verdict: **** / *****
The press release for “Vanitas” at Nathalie Karg Gallery, while overreliant on platitudes (it barely skips saying, “During these troubling times…”), ties together twenty works of disparate mediums—from eight artists—through the theme of memento mori. Up through Jan. 22, the group show, as is true of all group shows, is less than the sum of its parts. Mike Lee’s cubist black and white oil paintings look like tired internet art and Sarah Peters’ sculptures do little that is risky. The rest are intriguing, particularly Logan Crilley’s monochrome series, Cathleen Clarke’s haunted The Birthday—and its subsequent studies (all 2021)—, and Flan Flanagan’s lone work, a moody still life of a dead bird, a pomegranate, and eggs.
Vedict: *** / *****
Ross Simonini’s first solo New York show lands smoothly at anonymous gallery under the title “The All,” named after an eponymous essay by Simonini, who is mostly known for his writing. There is a friendly naïveté to these pictures which the press release appropriately labels as “safe for babies.” One sculpture, a white planter pot, contains soil that emits laughter, a recording of Simonini’s practice of hahaha-ing as a form of therapy. In their warm jewel tones and smiling characters, S’s cheeriness emanates from his canvases.
Verdict: **** / *****
Chastity is out. What’s in is the sexually perverse. First, John Currin’s buxom-y grisaille gals “wind[ed] eroticism into the obscene,” at Gagosian. Now, there’s Namio Harukawa’s “Femdom” at ATM Gallery (up until Jan. 23), a sort of Tom of Finland of cucked and tiny straight men whose faces are subsumed by fat ass and pussy. The drawings follow a pattern: Each features a large woman of the Crumb variety, sitting atop an exhausted, subservient man. The women— who are rendered with cartoonish proportions, though with a certain realism within that exaggeration—are either pleased or indifferent, though always in charge. The palette is paired down, drawn in graphite pencil on paper, with the figures sometimes offered a skin tone to add more life or a flourish of red lipstick. To me, this show signals that it’s time to un-cancel Balthus or at least resurrect John Kacere from anoynmity.
Verdict: ***.5 / *****