Entering the first room of the gallery, one is instantly struck by the richness of movement in Cecily Brown’s paintings. Several recent works, drawn from nature walks, centre on the motif of a log laid across a blue stream. This fairy-tale imagery, bordering on kitsch, was borrowed from a jigsaw puzzle Brown was completing at the time. Yet the jagged shrubbery and turbulence surrounding these scenes point towards something darker.
Helen Frankenthaler’s show at Gagosian New York, The Moment & The Distance is a beautiful retrospective survey of her work. The title is inspired by a mid-career essay by Barbara Guest that encapsulates the essence of Frankenthaler’s work. In the 1975 essay Guest defines Frankenthaler’s oeuvre in terms of music. She reflects that while there is beautiful “humming” in Frankenthaler’s early work, over her career it becomes “song”. As her work matures, Guest argues, Frankenthaler becomes more decisive, methodical and assured in her practice, less spontaneous or reliant on happy accidents. Beyond demonstrating the present moment in the paintings, she walks the effortful distance to “consolidate her terms”.
Installation view, DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory at Gagosian
Painting is infused with jagged jolts of adrenaline and endorphins this month, as evidenced by the markedly etched walls of white cubes sprinkled across Chelsea. Broad, gestural sweeps across canvases move into sculptural territory through the decisive claiming of space through prescient encounters. At Gagosian, Jadé Fadojutimi’s flourishing brushstrokes are illuminated by radiant pearlescent and neon hues that push and pull with hypnotic intensity. One is lifted off their feet and transported to an alternate world teeming with dance cards chock full of visual tangos with electric punctuations. At Seizan Gallery, Yashushi Ikejiri also embraces striking, colorful combinations through vibrant representations of the mundane, bringing an almost surrealist figuration of vignettes through a masterfully crafted language of paint. Pinaree Sanpitak’s presentation at Lelong & Co. takes a different approach through the limitations of color, where neutrals dominate with equal measures of intensity and fervor. Alteronce Gumby wonderfully bridges the two approaches of marrying bold colors with delicate textiles by showing two different bodies of work that tether these realms at Nicola Vassell. Light remained a constant inhabiting each gallery, moving across, through, or exuding from within each painting. As the brilliance of these colorscapes warms us from the inside out, each of these artists causes us to pause; the light they emit remains a constant with us as we move across our respective paths across the earth.
View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York. Photo Maris Hutchinson
The conjunction of art and politics is a confusing and often compromised enterprise. The commentator Ben Davis argues that as our society regresses under the politics of neoliberalism, such art serves a “compensatory role.” Much explicitly political art is either pedantic or satirical. There’s a long history dating back to the Incoherents and Decadents, the late 19th-century artists who embraced absurdity, irrationality, and the grotesque to protest against emerging bourgeois values and the academic practice of art. They used parody, satire, the carnivalesque, as well as didactic and pedantic jokes to expose cultural ideocracies and societal flaws. This was followed by the Dadaists in the early 20th century, who expressly mixed real-world politics and provocative, anti-art gestures with the intention of undermining social and artistic conventions and setting the groundwork for a social and cultural revolution. Since then, and as an avant-garde compliment to social realism, there has grown up a tradition of the trickster artist—pranksters using absurdity, parody, and gestures to scandalize and provoke their audiences.
