April 25 to June 22, 2013
20 West 57th St, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 244 6055

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”

And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, , Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches.  What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.

The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.

Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.

John Zurier, A spring a thousand years ago, 2012. Oil on linen, 72 x 44 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.

A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles resembling bits of electrical tape which in turn align in an upward-curving sweep as if caught in a current of wind or water. Nothing about the painting feels arbitrary. The very fact that, when working small, Zurier apparently avoids standard formats supports the impression that their every detail is the more considered.

The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.

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May 5 to June 16, 2013
133 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Delancey
New York City, 212 598 3012

Maria Petschnig, Petschsniggle, 2013. HD Video (color, sound), 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

Winding through the airtight spaces of Maria Petschnig’s video installation gives you a sense that you’re entering the artist’s body. Multiple close-up views over her shoulder or hip, expanses of soft-flesh-colored material and self-referential subject matter create an engulfing interiority that is both disturbing and funny.

The fake paneling and drop ceilings that greet you at the door make you think you’re visiting a plumbing supplier rather than a gallery. Tawdry images in the exhibition’s first video, Vasistas (2013) adds to that sense. A suited, mustachioed man sits behind a desk, while in the foreground a trench coat-wearing Petschnig performs an exhibitionistic dance. Figures in another scene lie on gray shag carpeting, and in a third, the artist stands in front of stacked boxes, her body wrapped in packing tape.

The artist’s back is almost always turned toward the viewer while the material she is facing is blurred. What you see, in fact, is not full-fledged video but footage of the artist superimposed on still photosby green screen. It’s as if you are tagging along on Petschnig’s daily routine, but instead of seeing the world through her eyes, you view a parade of backdrops she has assembled for her own amusement.

Maria Petschnig, Holdmetight, 2012. Wood, polyester, pantyhose, padding, 11 x 8 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

As you proceed through a labyrinth of paneled corridors, the feeling of being absorbed into the artists’ physical being becomes palpable. Light levels decrease toward the interior of the building and colors are rendered more uniform. The tan sheets of Mycroft (2013), a mattress plastered on one wall, cover bulging forms that vaguely resemble body parts. Holdmetight (2012) has more bulging forms made of stuffed pantyhose that hang at waist level through the ring of a towel rack. The bulbous material resembles insect larva although thanks to the stockings’ flesh tones it is also penis-like.

Nowhere is flesh more abundant—and more uncomfortably close—than in the final chamber of the exhibition. Here the video Petschniggle (2013) shows figures in various states of undress and of interlock. Two women lather each other up in a tiny tub, their bodies partly sheathed in plastic. The same pair appear later in a tiny shed whose wooden walls resemble the paneling from the gallery walls. With bodies partly cropped it is not clear exactly what the couple is doing but their position is suggestive of “69-ing”

It is shocking but strangely fitting to learn that Petschniggle stars the artist and her twin sister. The installation coalesces as Petschnig’s personal echo chamber. She casts herself in dramas whose other actors are either still photos that she selected or persons whose DNA matches her own. She even titles the work using made-up, self-referential language. What is a Petschniggle, if not a dance done by people named Petschnig? After wandering through this flesh-colored universe of a gallery of ultra-close-up bodies shot in closet-like spaces, you emerge as if ejected from someone’s insides. Fortunately Petschnig’s humor—from the choice of déclassé materials to the Seussian terminology—saves this installation from being angst-ridden, pornographic, or simply grotesque.

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April 5 to June 2, 2013
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
New York City,  (212) 219-2166

Giosetta Fioroni, Bambino solo (Lone Child), 1968, pencil, white aluminum enamel on canvas, 39 3/8 x 78 11/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Giuseppe Schiavinotto.

A lightbulb, a heart, a bed. The first three recognizable images in the Italian artist Giosetta Fioroni’s mini retrospective at the Drawing Center exude simplicity and lightness. Rendered in silver aluminum paint and graphite pencil, her paintings on paper are like evocative cover songs in which a new personality is encoded onto a popular tune. In contrast to Jasper Johns’ bronze Light Bulb I (1958), Jim Dine’s 1960s heart paintings or Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Fioroni suspends her images within expansive space, creating a context for them that feels emotional and quiet. Like much of the work on view, these paintings, made in 1959-60, have a diagrammatic quality, like theater props or designs for a larger, unseen ensemble.

The Drawing Center has become the go-to venue for re-contextualizing artists within a historical continuum of Modernism and cross-media experimentation. (Remarkable exhibitions of Frederick Kiesler, Ree Morton, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn fit this bill). L’Argento is notable for being Fioroni’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which is surprising for an artist who achieved a high level of critical attention in her native country in the 1960s. Giosetta Fioroni, born in Rome in 1932 to artist parents, was the only woman member of the Piazza del Popolo group of Roman artists that included Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi, artists who were, in Fioroni’s words, “interested in pictorial reality after ‘Art’ Informel.” The group was also closely aligned with the eurocentric, cerebral version of abstract expressionism practiced by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (a close friend of Fioroni’s), who were both highly visible in Rome in the late ‘50s. The earliest work in the show, a series of untitled drawings from her Parisian Journal (1958-62), made in “a tiny room that Tristan Tzara offered me” are a storyboard of abstract thoughts. They provide a glimpse into a young artist’s private world, her preoccupations with language, automatic writing, childhood, and theater that would provide the basis for her mature body of work.

Silver, commonly associated with Andy Warhol’s factory and the silver clouds and studio décor of high Pop, is for Fioroni a craftsman’s substance, a way to imprint memory in space.  Her three all-over silver canvases suggest a pile-up of celluloid. In Lagoon (1960) and The Secret in Action (1959-60), there is an opulence and variety to the marks; the stenciled word “LAGUNA,” appears underneath a graphite rectangle shape. Fioroni is effectively naming the painting within the painting, framing space for the art object in a similar manner to Jasper Johns’ Tennyson (1958). The paintings are nearly monochrome, but they read more as open-ended experiments than the contemporaneous blue paintings of Yves Klein. Here silver does not embody a jewel-like commodity (recently evidenced in Jacob Kassay’s highly prized silver-oxidized canvases), but signifies what Fioroni describes as a “non-color,” an emulsion layer that can absorb and reflect light.

Giosetta Fioroni, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1961, oil and enamel on canvas, 45 3/16 x 35 inches. Collection Jacorossi, Rome.

Fioroni’s paintings of archetypal ‘60s models’ faces, unsmiling and vague, framed by the semi-oval of a camera lens, dominate the show. Double Liberty and Liberty (both 1965) feature an image of the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli’s blankly staring face. The two-toned reductive image has a strong graphic quality that resembles silkscreen. The multiple borders, edges, drips and scratchy note-like pencil marks around the faces are the personalized touch that stops the work from being read as either pure idolatry or cultural critique. Less overtly dated as “Pop” painting and more purely imaginative are Lone Child (1967-68) and Self-portrait at Seven (1971-72), figures of children seen from behind and gazing into space. They carry the patina of time that the decades have bestowed on them with greater assurance than contemporaneous works; the browning edges of the cream paper and canvas come across as purposeful and true, mimicking the old photographs that the paintings themselves are presumably based on.

The conceptual and visual aspect of Fioroni’s art is further reduced in the 1970 Laguna series of silver paint and pencil drawings of the villas and vistas of Venice’s Grand Canal. In one drawing the stenciled words “San Marco” at the bottom of an empty trapezoidal shape are the only indication of the famed piazza. The potential of photography to contain all information about a given place, especially a postcard-perfect location, is inverted in this work. In conversation with the critic Alberto Boatto (in conjunction with a 1990 monograph on her work) Fioroni draws a connection between her imagery of landscapes, ruins, and solitary figures and a “sweet, rural Italy that no longer exists, replaced nowadays by a telegenic one.” Mixed in with this sentiment, however, is the spectral presence of war and politics: A painting from 1969, Obedience shows a woman giving the fascist salute, and The Mountain Tomb (1971) depicts a mountain in the Alps that was the infamous site of a battle between Italian and Austrian troops in the first world war.

Fioroni’s art is that tricky to define thing: tasteful radicalism.  Her 1960s paintings of “It girls” and lost children could as easily adorn the living rooms of Italian intellectuals as Morandi paintings did in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1963). I can see how her art’s meaning could expand through its proximity to the culture of a household, a city, or a country. Politely installed in the institutional cool of the freshly renovated Drawing Center it becomes a challenge to grasp the work’s full spectrum of content, the host of political and social implications that a contemporary Italian viewer would have picked up in Fioroni’s subject matter. What does come across is a devotion to theatre as the silver lining of all visual experience—from her early drawings of costumes, to the doll’s house sized sculpture, Home: Domestic Interior (1969), to the illustrated script for Countryside Spirits (early 1970s), a play loosely based on the village she lived in. Giosetta Fioroni’s work from the 1960s resonates today as an artifact of singular affection and ambivalence towards her country’s (and indeed the western world’s) new culture of spectatorship with its mediated relationship to personal and historical images.

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Joan Linder, Counter, sink, 2013. Ink on paper, accordion book, 31 x 156-1/2 inches (open). Courtesy of the Artist and Mixed Greens.

Joan Linder draws with meticulous, methodical obsession.  You can read every word of the label on a near-life-sized organic milk carton, one among a hundred minutely observed everyday objects forming a panoramic chronicle of domestic bliss and chaos, amplitude and guilt – the kitchen countertop.  Linder hatches and crosshatches black and colored inks without inflection to achieve vivid saturations of “cheerful” color against the white of the paper, an effect of forensic clarity.  (Linder has drawn research and pathology labs with similar comprehensiveness.)  Despite their commanding rigor, Linder’s drawings never feel dry, clearly proceeding from internal geometries wobbling with curiosity and willfulness.  The press release is at pains to offer that Linder’s husband shares in domestic chores, so a knee-jerk feminist reading is too easy: the double basin sink here, with dirty dishes on one side, rinsed ones on the other, might be a quotidian reminder of sin and redemption, or the bicameral nature of an artist’s life.

Joan Linder: Sink on view through May 24, 531 West 26th Street, 1st Fl, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 331 8888

April 18th to June 1st, 2013
535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 627 3930

Keith Smith’s small, mostly monochrome images at Bruce Silverstein trigger a refreshing, animal sensation of quiet intrigue that’s rarely experienced in art nowadays—something that neither requires critical context nor resort to shock for immediate engagement.

Keith Smith, Alan Undressing, 1978. Gelatin silver print with sheet film and stitching, printed c. 1978, 7-1/8 x 4-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein

The show of brings together, for the first time, a large group of works from Smith’s earliest years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with photographs that combine sewing, drawing and painting from 1960 to 1980. In 1978 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of American Photography since 1960 alongside William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander; although his mixed-media, irreverent approach to photography does not follow the path of his then peers, his works maintains what the press release for that exhibition had exalted as the “pursuit of beauty, that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of meaningful life”.

Smith is also known for over 200 artist’s books (one of which is on display in this exhibition) that employ the three-dimensionality of the book and a meticulously guided reading experience to incorporate the dimension of time. The individuality of each page competes with the book’s overall progression.  A comparable energy is found in this show of photographs. Smith works from highly selective source images, consisting mostly of ears, eyes, his home and men he loved but could not express his affection towards. Continuity zigzags through each image’s mixed media surface and throughout the show as the motifs are explored repeatedly over 40 years, each time in a different medium and under new circumstances.

Repetition, for Smith, is a tool for revelation rather than desensitization. In addition to illustrating a surge of movement, his gelatin prints of 8mm film expose a kinetic materiality that only becomes salient whilst their subjects are in motion: when isolated from the rest of the body, the hand in “Untitled” (1966) becomes a simple glove that encloses the human touch, a shifting outline activated by the detection of its surroundings. The unique hand drawn elements add urgency and scarcity, counteracting the comfort of print reproductions and establishing a permanent, conscious attachment between the image as a concept and its physical manifestation. The matrix of 30 pans with fried eggs in Bicycle Seats (1967) is created with print emulsion and subsequently colored by hand. The shadows and shifting handlebars almost form a rhythmic pattern which does not diminish the  sovereignty of each pan.

The most arresting works from the show are probably his depictions of men. Hand coloring, stitching and various printing techniques that supplement conventional photography extend the perceptual depth and presence of the dimension of time demonstrated by his book projects, allowing Smith to convey an incredibly intense, nuanced and ordered collection of sensations. A haunting negative (the chemical opposite of reality captured by photographs) of a man removing his shirt, Alan Undressing, (1978), arises through an image of a toned torso whose hand is halfway inserted behind his belt. Fantasy and reality intersect as Alan’s piercing white eyes and a rim of stitches reinforce the image’s tangibility. Another standout picture is 1971 for Book 22, (1971) a collage of a nude young man with surprised eyes curled up in bed. The right side of his body is a darker exposure of the overall image, furiously sewn on with bits of thread that resemble sharp spikes. They are like stitches that close up a rugged surgery wound, needle by needle, uniting Smith’s desires and the young man’s flesh as if they had always belonged together.

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Bernard Langlais, Thirteen Cats, ca. 1967, wood and paint, 48 x 96 x 2 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

New York’s American Art Week is dominated by the auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s taking place May 17-26.  To coincide with the week’s theme, fourteen dealers team together for their own event, Just Off Madison: An Open House. Spanning the blocks between 67th-80th streets along Madison Avenue, these private dealers are rarely open to the public.  So it’s worthwhile to make your way over for three hours this Wednesday.

These specialists in American art will mostly be showing paintings and works on paper dating from the mid-1800′s through present day.  One example is Al Held’s Untitled (1961) at Betty Krulick Fine Art. Ltd.  The other participants are Avery Galleries, Jonathan Boos, Connor – Rosenkranz, LLC, Debra Force, Fine Arts, Inc, Graham, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi & Schoelkopf Fine Art, LLC, MME Fine Art, LLC, James Reinish & Associates, Inc, Franklin Riehlman Fine Art, Gavin Spanierman, Ltd, Lois Wagner Fine Arts, Inc and Meredith Ward Fine Art.

Also in the neighborhood, Alexandre Gallery, very much open to th public as a matter of course, acknowledge American Art Week with a special display of members of the Stieglitz Group along with their current exhibition, the redoubtable Bernard Langlais, as Americana as they come.

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April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh, Black Bottom, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

James Walsh, Colorbook: Paularry, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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February 8 to May 18, 2013
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City

In a variation within our series, A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES, David Cohen offers his thoughts on a survey of the artist’s cutaway painting on top of his reviews on the same body of work on three previous occasions (the latter originally published in the New York Sun).  Readers new to Harkness will want to read the reviews in order of publication.

Hilary Harkness, Red Sky in the Morning, 2010-11. Oil on panel, 37 x 42 inches.
Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation. Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2013
The other day I was musing on a profound subject: who will star in the first movie made of a Hilary Harkness painting?

The obvious casting choices for the party-girl warriors who populate, in miniature, her dense, chirpy yet  grotesque scenes are those acrobatically proven in the action movie genre—Angelina Jolie, say, whose assassin or tomb-raiding getup recalls the bikini-booted scanty efficiency of the Harkness babe.

But why would anyone turn an artwork into a movie, you might be asking?  The traffic in contemporary culture is entirely the other way around, with artists raiding cinema.  Hollywood – adapting novels and historic events, regurgitating TV shows, and Broadway musicals, remaking other, old or not so old Hollywood movies – has surely never, in similar fashion, made a film of a painting.  Art history-savvy directors make compositional sense of them in individual shots, but that is a different matter.  There was “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” (2003) but that’s from a novel that spins a yarn around a painting, and is thus at several stages removed.  What I have in mind for Harkness is something more like director Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” (2011) but even there the narrative arc takes in Brueghel the Elder, author of the 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary,” that is the movie’s painterly progenitor.

This is all a rather discursive way of saying two things about Harkness.  First, that there is a narrative logic in her work that compares to literature or movies more than to the static medium of easel painting, at least at the pace that form has demanded of viewers for the last few centuries.  In Harkness, local incident unfolds over time as the eye is obliged to read accumulative detail.  And secondly, “bad girl” transgressive as they remain, these sado-masochistic scenarios warrant big audience attention rather than art world connoisseurship. The ingenuity of Hilary Harkness has (or ought to have) blockbuster appeal.

The Flag Art Foundation has brought together fifteen, which is to say almost all of these labor-intensive and thus rare works from Harkness’s signature idiom, the cutaway babe-infested setting, whether terrestrial or nautical .  As the artist has begun to move decisively in the direction of more traditional, single-scene images staffed by dramatis personae of legible individuality (her Gertrude Stein series), the Flag show affords that first chapter in her work a retrospective sense of closure.  Her newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture.  Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view.

Later paintings within the Flag group witness odd shifts in scale and the introduction of male and animal characters, but still, you might wonder, what would there be for an actress to do, to say, to emote in such emotionally vacuous situations as Harkness offers? Angelina will require adversaries, of course, so step up Milla Jovovich and Charlize Theron.  But how would these players “co star” when casts of thousands are actually rendered equals, each with their deadpan walk-on macabre moment?  I guess it will have to be one of those movies where the star mutates, like the namesake lead in “Being John Malkovich” (1999), and like a comic book-derived action movie all the while regaining pristine calm as they are choreographed from one act of chilled meanness to the next.

In a way the Surrealists would have loved, where one message in my inbox this morning reminded me that the Flag Foundation show is about to close, the next message put Ms. Jolie herself in a headline with news that the actress has undergone a double mastectomy to diminish her odds of cancer. Life is never the jolly game that art can be, snipping the wires between violence, beauty and pain.  If there can possibly be meaning in this bizarre juxtaposition of data (not to force equivalence) it will have to do with second chapters, courage and sparky women.

Hilary Harkness, Pearl Trader, 2006. Oil on linen, 30 x 33 inches. Courtesy the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

2008
Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

Hilary Harkness, Matterhorn, 2003-04. Oil on linen, 20 x 27 inches. Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation.
Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2005
The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in [Elizabeth] Huey [discussed earlier in the same review]: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be old masterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveals the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

2004
Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of [Cindy] Sherman and the crowd addiction of [Spencer] Tunick [discussed earlier in the same review]. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

Editorial Note: Today (Monday, May 13) is the last day of Frieze, and yesterday tickets and transportation sold out: the fair recommends online booking to avoid disappointment.
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Work by Marianne Vitale, foreground, on view at Frieze Art Fair 2013, Randall’s Island, with an exhibition of Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine’s booth in the distance. Courtesy of Frieze

It’s somehow fitting that this year’s installment of the Frieze Art Fair takes place during the same weekend as the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann’s movie has been criticized for its emphasis on excess, its literally in-your-face materialism. But, in the final analysis, under those unnecessary trappings, the story is really pretty damn good.

Frieze, in its second year at Randall’s Island, also tells a great story, even if you sometimes have to look beneath the bloat (and pay a $42 entrance fee) in order to discover it. With over 180 galleries (about half of them from Europe) spread over territory the size of three football fields, it is easy to come down with a case of art fatigue. But the nice thing about Frieze is that it balances excess with the sort of refinement that allows the fairgoer to forget, at just the right moments, that the whole thing is founded on crass commercialism.

For starters, there is the whole middle section of the fair, which features the Frame and Focus selections, the Frieze designation for participating galleries founded less than six years ago (Frame) or in or after 2002 (Focus), each showcasing a single artist whose work has not previously been seen in an art fair context (Frame) or a curated project specifically proposed for the fair. These are the fair’s cool kids, its bathroom smokers: they strike just the right mix of not caring at all and caring a lot, of posturing and earnestness. There is, in many of the Frame booths, a kind of compelling, contagious energy, as if the people involved have not yet had the chance to become jaded, to lose faith, and the results are a little rough around the edges in a really nice way. These aren’t underdogs exactly—one of the Frame artists, Stewart Uoo, showing at New York’s 47 Canal, has a small show at the Whitney, which opened the same day as Frieze, and features his former art school classmate, Jana Euler, who happens to be part of the Focus display at dépendence—but they also have not yet grown complacently satiated by success.

One of the Frame standouts is Julia Rommel at the consistently excellent New York gallery, Bureau. Rommel’s understated monochromes have a stunning simplicity, and they serve in the manner of a sorbet palate cleanser during a multi-course meal: a necessary corrective, a chance to remember why you are there in the first place.

A work by Julia Rommel, an artist exhibiting with Bureau Gallery, New York as part of the Frame section of Frieze Art Fair 2013

Rommel’s work speaks to a truism oft forgotten in this era of blockbuster museum shows and auction extravaganzas: less is usually a whole lot more. In fact, over and over again, it is the most restrained exhibitors that strike the sharpest at Frieze. One excellent example of this is Cheim & Read’s booth, which includes Pat Steir’s beautiful Birthday Painting. For whatever reason—experience? national disposition? royal decree?—London galleries are especially apt at this. At Maureen Paley, Paul P’s small-scale portraits, suggesting a terrifically depressed Elizabeth Peyton, are wonderful, as is Maaike Schoorel’s painting, Vanitas. And there is something playfully innocent about Birgit Jürgenssen’s Polaroids at Alison Jacques Gallery. An  exception to good London taste is White Cube, highlighting Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Tracey Emin’s neons in a rehash of last year’s offerings.

Still, there is at least one point when the axiom invoked above fails to hold up or simply disintegrates in the face of insistent spectacle. At the fair’s North entrance stands Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth. Giant and vibrantly red, it suggests an unabashed delight at taking the whole shebang in stride. On Friday afternoon, the sun lighting up the Frieze tent, Balloon Dog practically signaled the coming of spring and renewal.

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Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
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Installation shot, Mark Greenwold: Murdering the World, Paintings and Drawing 2007-2013 at Sperone Westwater, May 10 to June 28, 2013

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

Mark Greenwold and Chuck Close. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Mark Greenwold, center, with Peter and Sally Saul. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

James Siena, Jim Torok, Alexi Worth. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Jim Torok, Elena Sisto, Mary Jo Vath. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Courtesy of Sperone Westwater. Photo: Allyson Shea

David Cohen. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

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