June 24–September 28, 2011
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York City 212-423-3500

Installation view of Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 24–September 28, 2011 Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, showing (left) Relatum—silence b, 2008, courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, and (right) Dialogue, 2007, Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles

Sensual the boulder upon the floor, sensual the metal plate against the wall. Sensual the water-glossed curves of stones, the muscular thickness of steel. The two components in Lee Ufan’s sculpture Relatum – silence B (2008)—the boulder sloping seductively toward the plate, the plate coyly leaning on the wall—flirt with each other and the viewer, who is drawn haplessly into a coquettish ménage-à-trois in the opening gallery of the artist’s first major exhibition on U.S. soil. Here, as elsewhere, the brute fact of materials– the industrial plate on the one hand and the geologic ready-made on the other– succumbs to a latent, often humorous, anthropomorphism or “encounter,” a term favored by the artist for the interface between seer and seen. To label the sculpture as Minimalist misses the point: it ignores the artist’s five decades of research into the notion of Art as a vehicle of altered consciousness in which the relationship between the audience and the artwork, between subject and object, is presented as a fragile, phenomenological nexus revelatory of Being.

Marking Infinity, Lee Ufan’s Guggenheim retrospective, is heady stuff. Perhaps the philosophical content of the work explains why it’s taken so long for the artist to be presented to America, whereas in the late 1960s, he was catapulted to fame in Asia as a founding member and critical proponent of the Japanese group Mono-ha (“School of Things”), committed to creating artworks from everyday materials—paper, rope, steel. In both his art and in his writing, the Korean-born Lee grew in stature in Asia over the decades, to the point that last year Japan celebrated the opening of the Lee Ufan Museum– a 32,000-square foot monument designed by none other than Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Lee’s delay in recognition from the West is particularly compelling, and perhaps even poignant, when contextualized within the artist’s lifelong commitment to the universality of art over, and against, Orientalism. For an artist whose work exalts the “encounter” (The Art of Encounter is the key collection of Lee’s translated writings) and the “relationship” (nearly all his sculptures are entitled Relatum), the fragmenting tendencies of identity politics and otherness run counter to the inclusive purview of Being.

Lee Ufan breaking the glass for Relatum (formerly Phenomena and Perception B), 1968/2011, during installation of Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 2011 Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

For Phenomena and Perception B, the artist recreated an iconic Mono-ha sculpture, dropping a boulder on a sheet of glass fitted to a steel plate. Originally Phenomena and Perception B read as a vigorous critique of Modernism’s query of personal identity, but, fifty years later, the work is a shattering indictment of virtuality. The physical world, Lee’s art suggests, reifies invisible forces and energies that exist in a constant negotiation of alliances—self and world, art and self, body and consciousness, ad infinitum. No wonder the sculptures derive their power from a fanatical obsession with equilibrium, in which various components—material, spatial and proportional—toggle between harmony and chaos. From the cosmic collision in Phenomena and Perception B to allusions to particle physics in his series From Point and From Line, discourse on the phenomena that give rise to empirical reality resonates throughout the show. In Relatum, (1978) in which a curved steel plate covers a perky stone in the way a heavy blanket covers a child, humanity seems to peek out from under (or through) existence, as if to playfully say, “here I am!”

The final room in the retrospective features an installation from the recent Dialogue series in which the ontological concerns of the paintings find their latest, and perhaps most powerful, iteration. On three of the gallery walls, Lee has placed a single square brush stroke from a six-inch brush loaded with oil paint and mineral pigment in a spectrum of luminescent grays, slates, and pearls. While for many years his palette favored a nearly Yves Klein blue, the artist now communicates in the elegant ambiguities of gray. The culminating work posits windows on reality that hover on the surface of the walls and simultaneously recede into the ground, so that the eye is drawn through and beyond the energized patches of paint into the “infinity” of the retrospective’s title. But losing oneself in the experience of these works is not an end in itself: viewers should leave the show convinced of their own existential worth.

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James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring 1891. Oil on panel, 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches. Musées royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels. All images, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

James Ensor is the master of the mask—literally. In Self-Portrait with Masks (1899), the artist paints himself in the middle of a carnival throng. Only the heads are visible in the perspective, the bodies blocked by an agglomeration of weird and scary faces. Near the center of the canvas is the artist himself, looking a little apprehensive, but very human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters and skulls hemming him in on all sides. The painting begs questions about an artist who never managed to fit in. No wonder his anti-heroic stance inspired the alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, to cut their 1994 single, “Meet James Ensor.” The song title isn’t ironic. Although Ensor is well known in Belgium—the old 100 Franc bank note even sported his portrait —his fame does not always spread beyond Northern Europe.

The current MOMA show of drawings, engravings and small to medium format paintings does a decent job of educating the American public on Ensor’s work, but leaves the viewer mystified by an artistic output that is, by turns, charming, comic, disturbing and repulsive. It is as if Ensor tried artistic styles the way he tried on the masks sold in the family’s curiosity shop. Ensor is, in fact, a shape-shifter whose work seems to defy categorization and still arouses controversy over 120 years after his first show. Critics trashed him then and some continue to do so now: Artnet declares the MOMA exhibition “a wreck of a show,” complaining of his shifts in style. Lack of consistency has always been one of the biggest problems in assessing Ensor’s work.

Are still lifes Ensor’s strongest suit? His drawings? Is he really more of an Impressionist, Symbolist, Mannerist, Expressionist, or Surrealist? Or is he a political satirist? Does the often disturbing imagery indicate mental pathology, or is he just winking at Goya? The scatological works, such as the satiric etching Doctrinaire Nourishment (1889), with its community leaders defecating into the mouths of admirers, can still arouse repulsion, while The Oyster Eater(1882), with its sensuous depiction of a sea-food feast, complete with titillating lights illuminating the glassware, seafood and eyes of the sitter, suggest that twenty-two-year-old Ensor could equal Manet in masterful still-life.

If Ensor had had a solid, identifiable chronological development, it would be easier to make sense of this show, but he danced a circle in his own carnival, repainting and collaging old works, revisiting his former styles. In Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries (1885/88), he maliciously changed a delicate interior scene so that the head of the sitter is masked by a skull, though the Nabi tendency to blend figure and ground survives the transition from naturalism to… Surrealism? Perhaps the numerous self-portraits Ensor made—in The Dangerous Cooks(1896), he replaced the head of a herring (Ensor’s symbol for art) with his own self-portrait—are an attempt to locate his own artistic identity. In the more traditional My Portrait (1884), the artist, viewed realistically in torso, points at himself, perhaps desperately.

Compared with the oeuvre, the biography seems clear. The man who exhibited with Van Gogh and Monet, who received Emil Nolde and Wassily Kandinsky, who hung out with Einstein and devoured Edgar Allen Poe, led a reclusive life almost entirely in his native Ostend, even enduring the bombings of World War II.  His major works, painted in an attic studio above the family curiosity shop, were executed at least partly in house paint because he couldn’t afford oils. His family hated his art. The critics tortured him (“Ensor” was synonymous with abominable art). Even his closest artistic allies turned on him and shunned him from a collective exhibition. In a Kafkaesque moment in 1893, Ensor tried, in despair, to sell his studio and all its contents. There was no buyer. He carried on.

James Ensor, The Skate 1892. Oil on canvas, 31-1/2 x 39-3/8 inches. Musées royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

Death was his constant companion. The skulls, which appear early on in his work, are more than momento mori. On the beach, where over 130,000 Flemish were massacred by the Spanish in the 17th Century, skulls were as common as driftwood—Ensor kept some in his studio. While sometimes skulls symbolize his hateful critics, as in Skeletons Fighting Over A Pickled Herring (1891), at other times they take on an almost companionable air, another curiosity deposited by the sea.

In one of the more touching, funny paintings in the show, The Skate (1892), Ensor veers away from the macabre world of imaginary ghouls back to the homey gratifications of the Flemish still life. The fish slouches comfortably in the studio, looking tired, flabby and somewhat ridiculous alongside the other, nobler, sea fare—a comic onlooker in a death scene. It stares directly at the viewer, its expression baffled, uncertain as to whether it belongs in the studio or in the sea, though certainly it doesn’t belong with the other seafood—it is positioned apart, isolated from the crowd. In turning the still life into a portrait, arguably a self-portrait, Ensor is, once again, wearing a mask.

Ross Chisholm, Irradiation 2009. Oil on canvas, 7.87 x 5.91 inches. Images courtesy of Marc Jancou Contemporary

The title of Ross Chisholm’s exhibition, “FIN,” signals “END” in French.  In this latest body of work, the artist appears to be moving away from his acclaimed series of small-format paintings featuring found images of Brits on holiday. Of the 18 canvases in the current show, only three use 20th-century vacationers shorn of their iconic snapshot landscape and repositioned amid mysterious painterly realms.

Is that meticulously rendered woman with handbag and sensible shoes, for example, gesturing toward the abyss of an absent landmark in Under the Fading Light of the Closest Star? (All the works in this article 2009.) Her hand seems to linger on light itself, while a thick blob of paint bobs above her head—part UFO, part Jackson Pollock. Her odd predicament brings an amused smile to our face, but not a laugh. The background shadows are too menacing and deep, throbbing with an almost Goya-esque expressionism. Maybe the matron is escaping into a sci-fi film. Maybe she’s wandering through the forbidden recesses of memory itself.

The imagery in Chisholm’s current show owes more to the august history of British portraiture and landscape than it does to mid-century images of vacationers, though his reliance on found imagery—either projected directly onto the canvas or appropriated as support—remains constant. In appropriating historical images, Chisholm is not creating a pastiche, in the way Laura Owens uses children’s illustrations, or Gilbert and George use pop British culture. Chisholm’s works do not turn on irony. The found imagery is transformed with results that are expressive and fresh.

In works like Down the Road to the River, the artist transposes a portrait of a noblewoman, the kind that might grace an Old Master, onto a readymade idyllic landscape reminiscent of Thomas Gainsborough. The woman floats, Ophelia-like, over the rustic countryside. Chisholm paints her in such a way that the woman/earth association fades out, like the folds of her dress, while the morphing pictorial superimposition releases potential imagery the way that clouds morph into recognizable forms. Is that a Buddha between her knees?

A tendency towards layering and superimposition is also present in a series of remarkable works that combine the sensuous detailing of the “portraits” with geometrical forms. These paintings, with their reminiscent Van Dyck-meets-Malevich moments, are nonetheless wholly Chisholm in technique and vision. The “fin” now is less French than it is dorsal. In the work that bequeathed its name to the show, the artist paints a partially translucent Old Master female on cardboard with spiky triangles along her back, while in Irradiation, triangular rays seem to beam out of a woman’s eyes, threatening to transform her from a proper 18th-century aristocrat into a seer from a distant planet. In some paintings, the triangles seem almost like shattered glass, as if the picture plane itself were breaking up, but the effect is not violent. Chisholm’s muted palette and mottled surface take the edge off, so the sharpness does not cut, but perhaps merely points—into the intimate corridors of a rich and astonishing imagination.