4 Columns
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? This art’s more lovely . . .
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, installation view. Photo: Shelby Ragsdale. © MCA Chicago. Pictured, top row, far left: Capture, Cut off Penis, Stuff Penis, Attach to Belt, Fitting, 1994.
On the heels of our summer-album roundup, this week we present our favorite estival art exhibitions, some of which readers in Chicago and New York can still catch. In a surprise twist, it transpires that our distaff team of critics was enamored of an all-women cast of artists, for some special hot-girl-late-summer vibes before September is thrust upon us.
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Moyra Davey: Horse Opera, Higher Pictures Generation,
16 Main Street, Brooklyn, June 12–July 26, 2024
Reviewed by Margaret Sundell
Moyra Davey: Horse Opera, installation view. Courtesy Moyra Davey and Higher Pictures.
Shot in and around the artist’s house in upstate New York, Horse Opera is Moyra Davey’s pandemic project. In the film’s voice-over, she speaks of a text message from a friend that captures the spirit of lockdown with a single word: “bardo,” it says—that liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Bardo is also used in a New York Times article to describe the different phases of a dance party DJ’ed by David Mancuso (the legendary gatherings were collectively known as the Loft and first thrown in the 1970s).
Departing from the first person—the mode of address in her other cinematic works—Davey shifts to the third in Horse Opera to tell the story of Elle (“she” in French), a habitué of the Loft. While a chronological arc is implied, Davey blurs time, describing each party in the present tense. She speaks of getting high, of feeling by turns anxious and euphoric, of admiring people beneath the disco ball, of waiting endlessly for the bathroom.
Counterposing Davey’s account are images of her rural surroundings. Often seen through a telescopic lens, there are birds, a bear, but mostly horses—running, turning to the camera, urinating in abundant streams. At first, the juxtaposition feels incongruous, but over time a dialogue builds. When Davey wraps a horse’s ankle with brightly colored cloth, she might be dressing it for a night out; when the horses nuzzle, they are social actors, so too the mingling partygoers; when they bolt, it is toward a freedom like the kind only felt on the dance floor.
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Yto Barrada: Part-Time Abstractionist, curated by Elisabeth Sherman, International Center of Photography, 79 Essex Street, New York City,
May 22–September 2, 2024
Reviewed by Ania Szremski
Yto Barrada, Bonbon 4, 2016. Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Yto Barrada.
At first glance, it all looks . . . lovely. Beautiful geometric abstractions, arisen from anodyne sources—sewing manuals, darkroom materials, children’s toys. But as the Paris-born Moroccan artist Yto Barrada has said, “misdirection is important for artists and magicians,” and as the title of her solo show at the International Center for Photography plainly states, she’s only an abstractionist part-time.
We begin with twelve hypnotic pictograms, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, black-and-white, the black a sensually textured background surface, the white a series of lines lying atop, each recalling, inevitably, the black paintings by Frank Stella, a very famous abstractionist Barrada has referenced elsewhere. Stella’s paintings live in museums and are worth lots and lots of money. Barrada’s pictograms capture practice sheets for apprentice seamstresses, which are worth nothing. But they are just as beautiful. Why not?
Barrada has described herself as a Pippy Longstocking-ian “thing-finder.” The other series on view here (like Bonbon, based on candy wrappers Barrada had in her pocket when she went to the darkroom) are all born of this practice. All of them are contingent, improvisatory, and wonderfully easy to look at. All of them are also about work—artwork, and labor, of different kinds. Work that can be hard to see.
In the biggest gallery, a monitor sits on the floor, playing on loop the four-minute 16mm film A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners (2014). This is an activation of a 2003 sculpture by the artist, a table-sized maquette of a city. In the film, a procession of three black toy Mercedes parades an unseen Official Visitor through the town, causing palm trees to spin up from holes in the ground, the scrubby facades of the buildings lining the road to pivot around to reveal clean fronts, the still Moroccan flags to suddenly stir to flapping life. The cars disappear, and everything descends back to what it was. Misdirection. Things that might be lovely to look at might be hiding something hard to see. The artist as magician misdirecting us to something real.
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Maja Ruznic: The World Doesn’t End, Karma, 22 & 188 East Second Street, New York City, June 26–August 23, 2024
Reviewed by Johanna Fateman
Maja Ruznic: The World Doesn’t End, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Karma. © Maja Ruznic. Pictured, left: Arrival of Wild Gods II, 2023.
At Karma, four tremendous paintings, like murals or picture windows, present astral yet earthy scenes of mythological-seeming significance in the most transporting—or teleporting—show of my summer. Maja Ruznic’s smaller works on paper (which fill another of the gallery’s spaces on Second Street) are also great: semiabstract compositions of biomorphic forms and geometric scaffoldings, punctuated by an arcane lexicon (radiant eyeballs and threadlike lines, suggesting umbilical, narrative, and psychic connections between things). But it is in the panoramic canvases of The World Doesn’t End, for which she switches from gouache to oils, that the painter’s rich palette takes on a gemstone vibrance, her imagery rendered with scumbled veils of color to appear torchlit, reflected in dark pools, or shaded by forest canopies.
Ruznic, who had two paintings in the just-closed Whitney Biennial—entrancing wild cards in an exhibition light on figurative painting—was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1983 and fled the Bosnian War as a child, living with her mother in European refugee camps before settling in California in 1995. (She now lives in New Mexico.) Personal history and our geopolitical present inform the themes of cataclysm and displacement felt in her arrangements of apparitional and extraterrestrial figures. The Dark Place of Star Lines and Electricity shows its translucent wanderers in profile, embraced by a hazy, cerulean-and-chlorophyll architecture of concentric, upside-down arches. I thought of Marc Chagall at his trippiest and most folkloric, as well as of the occultist painter Paulina Peavy, who channeled the spirit Lacamo to articulate an ancient, cosmological past (and utopian future). And if I had to choose, I’d say Ruznic’s smoldering, autumnal-hued Arrival of Wild Gods II is my favorite work—a woodland drama crowded with curious and mourning visitants; a pagan pietà with a Maleficent Mary figure and a slumping corpse at its heart; a tragedy promising rebirth.
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Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, MCA Chicago presentation curated by Jadine Collingwood and Jack Schneider, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, April 6–September 22, 2024
Reviewed by Aruna D’Souza
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, installation view. Photo: Shelby Ragsdale. © MCA Chicago. Pictured, left: The Session, 2008.
Given her status in the art world, it’s extraordinary that Nicole Eisenman: What Happened—now on its final stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—is the artist’s first major survey. But even the subtle self-deprecation of its title (a career is a summary of events, nothing more, nothing less) is a hint that she prefers not to be in the spotlight. Indeed, this exhibition (consisting of over a hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, and an installation) makes clear that her work is as much about the communities Eisenman has been a part of as her own infinitely imaginative capacity for formal invention. Her monumental group portraits filled with artist cameos and predilection for art-historical bricolage brings a host of other guests to the party—quite literally in the case of Seder (2010), in which every attendee is depicted in a radically different style, with nods to Renoir, Bonnard, Rockwell, Dubuffet, Guston, and more.
Eisenman came of age at the height of the culture wars, and her early drawings reflect a dark humor and insistence on joy that she and other queer pals marshaled as shield and weapon. A 1992 drawing, Untitled (Lesbian Recruitment Booth), literalizes right-wing homophobes’ worst fears. The misandry on display in Capture, Cut off Penis, Stuff Penis, Attach to Belt, Fitting (1994), drawn in the style of a Baroque battle scene, is delightful. But there is tenderness and vulnerability, too, as with an image of a forlorn patient in a therapist’s office (The Session, 2008), or the orange-hued mix of anger and sadness in Breakup (2011). Emotionally speaking, there’s something here for everyone.