Conversation with Ruth Marten
Published in Figure/Ground Magazine
Ruth Marten was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. February 7, 2020
Born and living in New York City, Ruth Marten has worn several hats, in spite of the hair. From 1972 to 1980 she was an important figure in the tattoo underground and, as one of the few women practicing the craft, influenced people’s ideas about body decoration, championing what came to be called Neo-Tribalism. Working during the Disco and Punk eras, she also tattooed in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris.
Hired by Jean-Paul Goude for her first illustration for Esquire, she had a 30 year career illustrating for many magazines, music and book covers and is most associated with the “Year in Provence” books of Peter Mayle, designed for A. A. Knopf by Carol Devine Carson. There was a brief stint as a fashion illustrator for Bergdorf Goodman, Salvatore Ferragamo, Barney’s and Vogue Magazine. That love of the printed image informs her current work: changing through overdrawing and collage the configuration and content of 18th century copper plate engraving prints. Personal work, principally on paper, has been a constant while working in these other fields.
Sine 1989 Marten has expressed herself exclusively through drawings, paintings and sculptures. Exploring the phenomenon of hair for its sexual, cultural and purely textural content, she exhibited work based on this obsession at Littlejohn Contemporary (NY), Adam Baumgold (NY), in the “Pop Surrealism” show at the Aldrich Museum (CT), “Hair, Untangling a Social History” at the Tang Museum (NY) and at the Halsey Institute in 2009 with “Hair on Fire”. In 2003 she embarked upon her current interest in reworking the images and historical content of mostly 18th century prints from engravings, which have been exhibited at Isis Gallery (London 2008) and Van der Grinten Galerie (Köln 2013) and have been collected by the De Young Collection (SF), Charles Saatchi, Don Ed Hardy, and others. In 2018-2019, Marten had a retrospective of her work at the Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, Germany. She also teaches Watercolor Technique at the School of Visual Arts.
You are a master draftsman. Did you do a lot of drawing as a kid?
I did start making art very early. My mother, who had incredible innate taste and sensibility, she encouraged it once she saw I could do certain things. She had an incredible eye for interior design. She took me to museums and galleries. She was a great dresser. She knew she had no reason to know these things, but she knew. She was intelligent but grew up extremely poor. She had no possibilities herself so I became a project and I was fine with it. And I suspect also it was a place I went to because I felt safe there. I got the feeling that this was my vocation. It must have been because I never really looked further to do anything else.
Were you good at other subjects?
Penmanship.
Where were you living? Where did you grow up?
I was born in Manhattan and then we made the classic move to Long Island. We moved to Forest Hills in the 60s and then I went to the High School of Art and Design. I went from a white, uptight Long Island high school to you know, gay kids, Chinese kids, rich kids, poor kids. A total fabulous mix. And it was the 60s, so high school was great. And then my parents divorced and my mother moved to Jamaica Estates which is where the Trumps lived actually. But my goal in life was to live in New York and that’s the great irony because look at it now. There’s no there, there.
Did you move to the city right out of school?
I went to school in Boston and then I moved back to NY to start my grown-up life. I had to make a living. I had zero idea of how I was going to do that. I thought in my head that if I became a tattooist, I could draw, right. It’s what I like. So I got a little kit from Huck Spaulding up in Poughkeepsie and I started tattooing the burgeoning punk scene and especially the gay scene, and also women who were independent of their earlier, more domestic lives and wanted to assert themselves. And at the same time I was doing illustration.
That must have been a crazy time.
Well New York in the 70s was pretty interesting. There was a lot of crime, drug stuff, but when you’re a kid in your 20s, nothing’s ever going to hurt you. You just sort of move through it like you own it.
So you got jobs illustrating and jobs as a tattooist at the same time?
Yeah, everything was cheap in those days. I had a loft on 16th Street and it was $200 a month. But, you know, it was $200 I had to come up with, that, and I had a kind of useless husband so he wasn’t making his share.
Was he an artist too?
He was a singer. He had a great voice, but there was something wrong with him. He thought he didn’t have to work as hard since I was working hard.
Do you have memories of specific tattoos that you created? Were they always collaborations or did they ever let you go wild?
Yeah they did. I wasn’t a very good technical tattooist because I didn’t train with anyone. I was just sort of winging it, which I don’t recommend. Well I wasn’t going to hang out with Spider Web and Big Joe and those people so, you know I did the best I could, but what I contributed to tattoo culture was to encourage people to think of tattooing as a verb not as a noun. In the sense that anything could be a tattoo and if anything can be a tattoo you mine art from other cultures. It’s everything we think of today, but in the 70s, people didn’t think in those terms. It was the kind of typical tattoo flash images that were on the walls of commercial parlors and they didn’t really extrapolate. Artists did and Ed Hardy on the west coast of course. That was a major accomplishment in terms of turning people’s ideas of tattooing around. We’re good friends now. So he in his way and me in my little way. We were artists first and tattoo artists afterwards.
Would you come across your tattoos later, on the street?
Oh yeah. I’m not going to name names.
Because there were famous people that you tattooed?
Yeah, yeah.
Were you simultaneously doing your own art at the time?
Yeah, I was doing that too. I was doing my first illustration for Esquire and the art director was Jean-Paul Goude. And then I was also figuring out what the hell my art was at the time. I was very interested in ceramics. I was drawing on ceramics.
Were you creating ceramics too?
Yeah, yeah. Well, those were my interests in school – ceramics and drawing. So eventually they got together. I made these slab drawing glaze pieces with very pop subject matter. Because they were clay and because the glazes were so weird, everything had a nice distortion to it. They were a little primitive, but they were also sophisticated. I enjoyed that. I remember going to Frumkin [Gallery] when it was uptown and showing my work, and they looked at me like I had three heads, walking around with my ceramic slabs. As you know, it’s taken a long time for the art world to review, revalue, work made out of clay.
And now it’s more popular than ever.
Well it is because it’s been held back for 50 years. I think Ken Price was very instrumental in separating the craft, the boogie man title of craft from art. I think the way he did that was by not glazing. By coming up with that surface he did, which I’m not crazy about, but I understand it. It reminds me of Italian handmade paper. But the forms that he made. People who don’t really know ceramics have no idea how insanely difficult and extraordinary those things are. Some of them have 10” walls and they build the kiln around the artwork. I was in love with a group called the Funk Artists. People like Ron Nagle and Ken Price. I’ve always liked the West Coast artists, even though I’m very Eurocentric, but I liked them because they were very pop culture and they have a sense of humor. I find that to be a real necessity.
Your work seems to have a nod to surrealism, but then they are also incredibly funny. Downright comedic.
Well I’m not a very comedic person but I take it out on my work. That’s how I entertain myself.
I outright laugh when I see some of your work. Do you, when you are making them?
Yes. If I don’t laugh, then it is probably not working.
“Canapés II”
I think about Max Ernst and to the darker places that his work goes. They’re wonderful but without your humor.
Well, Ernst was an incredible, conceptual artist. He had such a fecund imagination. He was an amazing man and he had a difficult life. He produced just a shitload of work. I don’t like all of it, but if he had only produced, “Une semaine de bonté,” those incredible collages, if he had only done that. That was just one of the things he did. Yeah. Those to me are so perfect. They’re steeped in psychological insight. They’re a product of the junk flea market material that was around when he was producing stuff because they were ahead of him. That was mid-19th century. And I love to go and find stuff too. I started working with the old prints from stuff I found at the flea market because I fell in love with the paper. It’s like skin. Just out of curiosity, I wondered what would happen if … and then I was off to the races.
When did you do your first piece?
2006.
What were you doing before that?
All those hair paintings. I did that for a long time. And then it got kind of popular so I didn’t want to do something that other people were also doing if I could avoid it. Also it had run its course. I actually spent about two years on this couch staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know what to do after the hair pieces. I was so invested in that. So the flea market saved me.
You just happened to be at a flea market and thought, hmm..
Well I saw these card tables covered with 18th century book illustrations, and the guy, Arby, who was the salesman, a real slob and you know, like a lot of these print dealers, they cut them out of the books, right? But the truth is, that nobody wants the books. Individual pages had more promise. It was a fluke, but then it appealed to my sense of the absurd. And also, to the way I was raised. My mother was, as I said, very encouraging, but she was also very proper. So a lot of this work is iconic, the way it sits on the page, and it purports to tell you how to live, what kind of furniture to live on, scientific inventions. It was a manual. It was an education for people who were first able to buy books. You know, which after the Royals, it was the merchant class. And then by the late 18th century they would produce smaller books for the common man. And then of course, the 19th century with the printing innovations and the burgeoning middle class, then magazines. It was lithography. I wasn’t interested in lithography, and also the paper was really bad. But the 18th century was perfect. The paper is exquisite and it had these funny tutorials on social life, which you know, have all been shot down. But I thought, well, I’ll be the one to shoot them down.
Do you look at these images and then something comes to you visually?
Yes. And sometimes I held on to something for years that finally was the right thing, right? But mostly, I would never go near something of extraordinary value, aesthetic value, and I couldn’t afford to go near anything of financial value, like an Audubon. They don’t need my two cents worth. But this other stuff can definitely use it. Like Chippendale for example. He was a very savvy businessman. He hired an army of etchers, engravers, which were often in the same house, to draw up his furniture ideas. Then he would bind them and send them to all the major cities in Europe and then to the colonies. So people would order Chippendale chairs and tables and what have you. Those were the first ones I did. The furniture is for you to put something on the table or in a chair. I’m actually doing something now that echos that. I just realized that as I told you.
Funny, I was just going to ask if you go back to certain themes.
Sometimes. The show I just did in Cologne was photo-oriented. I found antique photo postcards and I had them photographed at a high resolution and then printed archivally but made really large, really large for me, 30 x 22 inches. For me that’s like a billboard, they’re like posters. I had a show with those and I worked into those with gouache and sometimes watercolor. Those were a lot of fun. I’m also working on these that are 3 x 5 inches, for the Cologne Art Fair. I have to produce 20 of them.
Do you use a magnifying glass?
No. It’s stupid work, but I have a passion for stupid work.
I love the alligators. I work with them too. They mean so many things to me.
What do they mean to you?
Among other things, they symbolize for me the reptilian in other people and in myself. They’re also so funny to me, funny-looking.
Don’t you have one where it’s embracing a human? I have one of those too. Well, there are certainly a lot of alligators out there.
What does it mean to you?
Danger, I think. Fascinating because they’re so dangerous.
“4”
Did you see them when you were in Miami?
When I was three years old, we went down to Florida, and apparently we saw alligator wrestling. I’m sure it probably traumatized me. I never forgot about the alligators, they were my strange totem creature.
Is there an intention for you with your work in terms of subverting, or is it more fun and play for you?
I think subverting is very important. I’m a glass half empty kind of girl. I like when things are beautiful and I make things beautiful. But I would never be happy with just prettiness. There has to be dark side. And nowadays it’s so easy. The hard part is trying to find a bright side just so you can get through the day. I’ll show you something I’m working on for my next show, the “Sex and Death” show. That’s gouache on paper. The idea of the decomposition. Actually it was inspired by a piece I saw at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. There was a Korean artist who made a cadaver suit. It was all black and buttoned up, very chic, actually. It had diagonal buttons across the front with little covers. On the sides, it had these white mushrooms. I thought, that’s very interesting. So I did my own version of that.
“Sex and Death”
Do you know how it’s going to go before you start?
You have to allow yourself some leeway. I’m so much of a control freak. I have to keep allowing my inner voice to tell me to do this or that. Not try to be in the straitjacket.
You have this printed out and then you begin. So you could potentially screw up?
No, I would just paint another mushroom on top! Well, I’m not a process painter. So I wouldn’t be messing with the paper. It’s just a straight gouache job.
Now that you are starting this series, it seems absolutely perfect for you – “Sex and Death.” I’m surprised you haven’t done it before.
I’m surprised too. How much longer am I going to live, so I better get to it.
How did your Mom react to your more subversive work?
It wasn’t her cup of tea but she knew me well enough to know she wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of it. She opened my eyes to the world and I saw what I saw. I’m the art director, I’m not re-inventing the wheel. I like the collaboration part of it. I don’t have the kind of ego where it’s necessary to create this whole world out of whole cloth. I like working with ideas that have already come to be with centuries of life to them. You come to yourself if you stay alive long enough. You get to play them out.
What were you creating as a kid? Were you subversive then?
I wish I could say I was, but no. I liked pop culture, I liked comic books. I liked books, illustrations. Everything a kid in New York is exposed to. The absurdity, the low end, the high end. When I went to high school, there were so many kids from different walks of life. We would go visit each other’s houses on the weekends and some of these kids were on Park Avenue and some were in Coney Island and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don’t think I completely realized how phenomenal an education I was experiencing by being able to move in and out of all those different worlds. Different classes, different ways of living. That to me was always what New York would or should or could be about.
You mentioned that you think of the alligators as being a scary thing. Do you feel like your work is about making the scary visible?
Maybe. I’m someone who’s kind of frightened about a lot of things. I don’t know. At this point in my life, I guess I have some tried and true totems. I’m mostly scared of what’s going on politically in this dictatorship that’s kicking in, which is, you know, going to eclipse everything we know. That’s terrifying. So, I hole up in my room and try to stay calm, and I go swimming a lot. And I guess like a lot of us, I’m freaked out. So yeah it fits to have scary stuff arise at this time.
And the need as an artist to put it out there.
Yeah.
Do you think the subversion in your work has more to do with the darker aspects of the human psyche or your psyche?
Yeah, it’s just my fucked up head.
Do you reflect on them after?
No, I really don’t. I’m not intellectual at all.
When you first discovered the surrealists did you feel a sense of kinship with them?
Well especially the Weimar German artists. I just thought they were so hip. Then look at Man Ray, a New York artist. He did so many things. Other artists have run with just one of those things. He was the first to cover that sewing machine. I don’t know what the genesis of Christo’s involvement with that was but Man Ray did it once or twice and moved on to other things.
What are your dreams like?
I have a lot of dreams. They are important to me.
Do you write them down?
I used to. I did some Jungian dream therapy for a couple of years. I always had trouble finding a place I could afford. Even 30 years after getting this apartment, my dreams tend to have to do with real estate, places. Who’s there? What’s left behind? Do I belong there? That’s a recurring theme. Yeah, I like dreams. I like the randomness. It is not random when your unconscious picks certain things out in what happened that day. It’s very well chosen by our unconscious. But because your unconscious is so indecipherable to your conscious, it seems random and strange. I think I have a real love for serendipity and finding things you’re not looking for. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a drive of mine. And that’s why living in New York is a great place to gather material.
“Industry,” 2019, gouache, cut paper collage and watercolor on archival print, 27 x 20 inches
When did the art world start paying attention to your work?
Not until the Germans did when I was 65 years old. That’s when I had my first show there and they sold my show out. I remember sitting on the plane going over to Germany, to my opening at the Van der Grinten Galerie, and thinking, I blew it, it’s too late, I’m too old. Nothing is going to come out of this, what’s wrong with me. Boo hoo. Then I get there, change my clothes, I go to the opening and watch people buying five and six at a time. After spending half an hour looking at something. Yeah, it’s all about timing and luck and finding the love.
How did you end up in Germany to begin with?
I was in a drawing show at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris in 2010 and I had way too much time to kill. My English dealer at the time, had gotten a booth and I realized I hadn’t been to Paris in a very long time so I went over there. I was bored out of my skull, walking around and taking cards when I liked the work. But of course no one wants the artist coming toward them. I always had this very old fashioned idea that the work would speak for itself. Right. So I found this gallery in Cologne and unbeknownst to me the two partners were splitting. Also unbeknownst to me they were crazy about history there because Cologne is a Roman town. Cologne means “colony” and it dates back to something like 300 AD. So it was a complete accident. Back in New York, I sent Xeroxes to them and it just so happened that because the partners were splitting, the partners I ended up with were looking for artists because they were opening a new gallery.
How great.
Yeah, when does that ever happen?
Do you ever do work that isn’t a collaboration?
I do watercolors. I would like to do something with writing. I always have something on the stove.
There’s so many things to do.
I know, that’s why I need to stay healthy.
Do you know and think about why you are creating?
No. I never thought about the why. I had problems in the past with the what. Definitely. I think, in a way, I coalesced quite late. Having been an illustrator, the what was always somebody else’s what. When I stopped illustrating it took me quite some time to learn how to move away from that. And maybe in a sense, I’m still doing that. But the story is so obscure and arcane that if what I’m doing is in fact an illustration, nobody knows the text so it doesn’t matter.
Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater
Reviewed by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
Since the 1970s, Susan Rothenberg has been feeling her way through her paintings with ambiguous gestures that become a road map to her intense and obsessive process. She creates and erases, leaving an aftermath of urgency and hesitation through assured, fleeting, and palimpsestic marks. This show of paintings and drawings were influenced by her New Mexico surroundings and include recurring motifs of hands, birds, and figures.
In Pack Rat Fall (2016-19), the rat could be dead but is painted vertically with splayed arms in a pinkish glow that suggests movement, even dancing. Its tenderly painted feet seem to stand on its tail. The hint of an eye in its raised head appears to be either closed to life or in ecstasy from it. In Four Red Birds (2017), the glowing creatures hover on the upper left corner of the mostly gray canvas, depicting the essence of bird-ness with little detail. Both canvases magnify Rothenberg's devotion to keen observation and a relentless questioning of form - an intense focus that produces a magical uncertainty.
Conversation with Betty Tompkins
Published in Figure/Ground magazine
Betty Tompkins was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. November 19, 2019
In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. Her large-scale, sfumato paintings highlight a particular tension with patriarchal conventions that continues to both stymie and stimulate Tompkins. In 1973, two significant paintings from her Fuck Paintings series were seized by French customs and, in April 2019, Tompkins’ Instagram account was deleted after she posted an image of a catalog reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, 1969, which is now in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou. In a 2017 New York Times article, Rachel Corbett wrote, “Part of what makes Tompkins’ work so enduringly potent today, and what made it too shocking for its time, is not just its frank sexuality: It’s that the art […] seethes with lust, ego, wisecracks and profanity. [She] demanded attention the way men did — through shock and awe.” Tompkins’ recent solo exhibitions include Talking, Talking Talking, Freehouse, London, U.K. (2019); Fuck Paintings, etc, J Hammond Projects, London, U.K. (2019); Will She Ever Shut Up?, P·P·O·W (2018); and Betty Tompkins, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2018). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paolo, Brazil (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016) and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others.
Photo credit by Grace Roselli
What were you painting when you were in college?
My senior thesis was on paintings of sinks. Everyone was very hoity-toity. They would talk about philosophy and theories and I would say, “but what about the paintings. It’s the painting that counts.” So one of my professors had attacked me for my attitude about subject matter, which is that how you painted it was more important than what you painted and after that discussion, I said, “I’m going to paint sinks.” It was so pedestrian. So I did it. Each one in a different style.
Like pop and realism and?
Yeah and I had seen a Robert Ryman so I did a white-on-white one. It was a great riff. And as a student, a great learning experience. Then I got more into graduate school. I started off with AE [Abstract Expressionism] because it was what I knew. I was in a totally foreign environment, so I went with my strong point. The imagery thing came up really fast. So I just stopped and began embracing imagery. I didn’t think very much about the content. I didn’t have much of an idea about what content was in the painting. When I would be studying Hans Hoffman and DeKooning and then Johns and Rauschenberg, the idea of what is the content of this painting became something that I couldn’t totally escape, so gradually I had to address it. And when I look back and thought about the sink paintings, I realized that was sort of brilliant because you make the content the process and not the subject. And then I realized I have been pushing this idea around since I was a student – in one way or another. I thought that was interesting.
Yeah, it is interesting. Which leads me to when you came to NY.
Yes in 1969, right after graduate school.
Did you get married in grad school?
No, in between undergrad and graduate.
That’s so young.
Yes, I was so young. Someone should have arrested me. I was the second wife of a professor. I was a walking cliché. I actually told him that “The odds of this marriage working out are very low.” I said, “You are twelve years older and fully formed and have a doctorate. “ I was 21, three days before, and not fully formed.
But you did it anyway.
Oh sure. My father always said he would cut me off as soon as I turned 21 so I skipped up in high school in order to graduate a little early.
Wow, that was very forward thinking of you.
Oh yeah. I was a good survivor. I’m very proud of myself for being a good survivor.
So, after this, you’re now in New York, and you are finding subject matter as process. You are living here and you come across your ex-husband’s pornography.
Well I knew about the porn collection. It came with him.
Right, but were you intrigued by it before you even thought to do anything with it?
No. To me it was porn. You use it to get excited.
But nobody had it back then.
Right. He would find ads when he lived in Washington State. He would find these ads, probably in girly magazines. He would rent a P.O. box in Vancouver, British Columbia, and send off these checks. And then he would wait a couple of months until he figured they must be there and he drove across the border to pick them up. He would hide them under the cushions of the car and drive back. At that time, it was 100% illegal to send that kind of stuff through the U.S. mail.
Oh, interesting. I was just reading this morning about when it became legal to have pornography here.
When was that?
Well it’s very sketchy.
It is very sketchy. I can tell you that when he got them it was probably 1960 – 1962.
That was very, very early. 1969 was when it became legal in Denmark which was the first country to formally legalize it.
Well he got his from Southeast Asia.
I read that in 1968, the U.S. Congress formed a Commission that was supposed to look into the pornography situation because the industry was becoming so huge so fast and they were getting nervous. The Commission came back with the unexpected result that the problem isn’t with pornography but is with the people.
That’s right.
But many people were unhappy with this, including Nixon, because they had a much more puritan view of the situation. So this is when you were getting started!
Well ever since I met my then-husband I knew this stuff was around.
It would just be sitting around?
Yes, sometimes. And I knew where they were. And that first year in New York, I was learning how to use an airbrush. And in the meantime I was going around to tons of galleries, because here I was finally in New York. The whole art scene was Madison Avenue from 57th street up to 86th street, where the Allan Stone Gallery was. Occasionally there were galleries on the side streets and that was basically it, and the museums. It was small enough that you could do it in one Saturday. My problem was I didn’t like most of the shows. I would say to myself that this guy, and it was generally a guy, worked two years on this show, and you couldn’t give it five minutes. I can’t force myself. It made me think about things and the only thing that I knew about the art world was that there was a social aspect to it. Where I went, which was Syracuse University and then Central Washington State College, you were there to learn the basics and when you leave, you ditch all this stuff, and reinvent yourself from scratch. So, I didn’t have the expectation that dealers would be waiting for me with open arms. And I did know the history of many of the artists, and I knew they didn’t have their first show until they were in their mid-40s or 50s. They had all gone through this process of developing, which they could do in private. Unlike graduates today who have to do it in public, and that’s a nightmare. I didn’t have any expectations. I was unaware that I was the wrong age and gender, and perhaps I was interested in the totally wrong subject matter. But I was good at going around and talking to people on a superficial level. I was good at going out on a really rainy or snowy day when nobody else was around and when it was empty, and people would talk to you. Then I started to make a push, out of curiosity, to have people see them. I mean nobody had seen them.
Can we go back to when you started making them. Why you started making them?
Yes. Well I’m going around and I’m bored as shit. And I have dealers telling me to come back in 10 years. My response to this was that nobody gives a shit as to what you do. So just do what you want and I found that incredibly liberating. Because I could see that the other alternative as a reaction to this situation was to be crushed. And that wasn’t my nature, So I said, You are free Betty. You are finally out of school and nobody gives a crap whether you work or what you do. I hadn’t articulated what I was doing yet, it was a non-verbal process, and then one day I’m riffing through the porn photos and I took one out and I began thinking, Now, if you take that part out, and you take those feet out, what’s left? And bingo, it’s what I was looking for. Because here was an image that in abstract terms, was beautiful. I mean, to this day, how the painting works abstractly, is one of my main concerns. And I said, Okay, this works. This is gorgeous. It should be big. And the other thing was, this image has charge. If I walked into a gallery, and I saw a painting of this, that is big, I would stand there for a really, really long time. And one of my reasons for starting to use this was, I felt that the image would grab the audience by the throat and make them stand there -this is probably very egotistical- and they could, if they stood there long enough, they could see what I had done as a painter to a painted surface. And that was it. I had the most absolute conviction. So the next day after school, I went to the lumber yard and had them cut the wood. We had a van. And the biggest, you could fit into it at an angle was something like 7’ x 5’ And so I made them all the same size. I was painting in the bedroom of our apartment in this little room where I would have to jump over the bed to get far enough away to see the paintings. For two years I was in that room. And the first person that I had come over to see the paintings walked in and ran out into the living room where I was, and then backed into the room. And I thought, my, my, my, what have I done.
Betty Tompkins, Fuck Painting #4, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York
So until that moment where you not really aware of how these paintings might affect an audience?
Not at all. I never paint with an audience in mind. I paint with myself in mind and I still do. It’s a really good habit to get into.
So you were really thinking about it as a painter in terms of composition and forms. In other words, how political was it for you?
Not really. Of course I knew what they were. When I originally titled these paintings I called them Joined Forms and things like that. But I always called them the Fuck Paintings to myself. When I started to show them again, in 2003, I then called them the Fuck Paintings.
Oh, so they weren’t originally titled that back in the day?
Well no, when I would talk to Don, my then-husband about them I would say something like “This is the 5th Fuck Painting I’ve made” and he would roll his eyes. He was a budding academic and he was like “Look who I’m married to?”
But of course the images came from him originally. You might think he would be fascinated by what you were doing.
No, he didn’t make that connection. He was totally horrified that people would find out and and he would get fired.
Really.
Yes. And in the mid-70’s I couldn’t get into a group show and I couldn’t get anything going, the days of slides. And I said to him, “I’m going to relabel the slides, and just put Tompkins. You’re a Tompkins. Take them around.” And he refused to do it. So I have no idea. I was starting to have a glimmer of an idea, that my age and my gender were working against me but he wouldn’t do it.
So you were able to show them a few times and then nothing?
I was in two groups shows. One at the Warren Benedict Gallery. The other at the LoGuiduce Gallery. I would get recommended to go see people but it was a 99% rejection. I did get into those two shows. It was famous people and me. Nobody bought anything, of course they didn’t. So I’m very happy that I managed to hold on to them for another 30 to 40 years.
So what were you doing during those 30 to 40 years?
I got really discouraged. And I was young. Young people are ambitious. While I had no expectation for a career, I was ambitious. Which is the only way you can survive in this art world. It is cutthroat. So, I just started to do other things. I made word pieces. I did animals and seascapes and law pieces. I wanted to watch the Winter Olympics, so I would spend the time making grids on these papers and painted a base color, and, wrote the word “law” in each square. And after the Olympics were over I went back in with the letters. So all words. When you take those tests that are right brain or left brain I always end up exactly in the middle.
So it doesn’t sound like you were particularly political in the beginning, when you first started working as a painter. You mentioned that you weren’t invited to the feminist groups, that they didn’t accept you. Did you think of yourself as a feminist?
Of course.
Did you think of your work as feminist work?
I didn’t think about that context, because if you were one that was enough. The politics went along with your belief. Since the choice was between being a misogynist and a feminist there was just no question, so yeah of course I was a feminist. Yeah, but totally rejected by the feminist movement and never invited to attend anything.
So when you were rejected by them – –
I was so rejected I didn’t even know I was rejected. That’s how rejected I was. I found out in 2016 that they didn’t like my subject or my source. They were polite enough, but they were also older than I am. I put it down to the youth factor. I didn’t really pay attention, I had other things to do. The feminists in New York were a tight and very small group. They perceived the world as being so against them, that they had to protect their territory. They would help their few friends with teaching jobs and exhibition opportunities but they didn’t let people in. Every new voice was a threat, because they perceived their situation as being so tenuous. I always do it and to this day. Because, to this day, I have never heard of anybody getting thrown out of a show because they recommended someone else for the show. I don’t know how I had this spirit, this generosity, but I did from the beginning.
No, you’re right. No one has ever gotten thrown out of a show for recommending someone else.
Their perception, was probably more real, and they riffed off of that.
Were the people that were looking at your work back in the 70’s saying very different things about it than they did 30 years later?
I can see that they look at it differently. People actually didn’t say very much to me about it back then.
What about the guy who ran out of the room?
Well his mouth was so open and I kept thinking, What have I done?
Did you ask him, “What have I done?”
No, I was too stunned and too surprised. When he went back in ass first, he did spend a fair enough time in there. Since that’s what I wanted, for people to spend time with those paintings, to me that was a huge success. He was looking at them seriously. He clearly did not want to engage in a critical conversation. Which was probably just as well. I was so young. I was still in my 20s. I was so inexperienced about talking about my work, what would I have said, “Yeah. You like it?
So then you were doing these word pieces that weren’t sexual at all.
Right. I crawled back into my work in a circle. When I was finished with the word pieces I wanted to just paint. So I stretched big canvases. I was a body builder at the time and I was painting body builders with animal heads and I found out later as I find out most things – later – that that’s an incredibly old tradition of animal heads on human figures. Mythology. But I found that out later. I would do dog heads. I love to paint dogs.
Me too!
Good! I would paint dog-headed figures and they were all body builders. For the first three I put the word “man”. And I would paint the bodies with the word “man” on top of the figure.
And were they bodies of men?
Yes, they were men. And one day, I looked at the painting without the words on it and I thought that’s a nice painting. I’m not going to put words on it. And I didn’t. And so I never did again. And then I got really involved in mythology. I have tons of books on mythology, symbolism. My favorite book was “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.” Oh, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful book. I did a lot of pieces with mythology. At a certain point I split what I had been doing into two things. So then there could be a whole animal and a figure or statue. I did that for quite a few years.
Are any of those here?
I kept them on stretchers for years, but then one day Bob Nickas came over and said, “You know Betty, people are starting to want to come to your studio. They aren’t coming to see that. They are coming to see this.” So immediately I took them off the stretchers.
Let’s talk about the Women Words series. So in 2002 and then 2013, you started this new body of work. How did that come into your head? Do you know?
Oh yeah. I went into this period where I was tired of being the only one in on the piece. It must have been 2002, and at that time a lot of artists were doing collaborations. I made an email saying, “I’d like to do another series using language,” to which I was referring to the cows and horses and the sea. I decided I wanted people to send me words and phrases about women, and if it’s in foreign language, please give me an accurate translation. I got 1500 separate words with a lot of repetition, and I organized it all in a list alphabetically. When I would have repeats, instead of retyping it, I would put another asterisk against the original word. And I was surprised at the number of pejorative terms.
I was too! You didn’t go into it asking for pejorative terms you only asked neutrally for a description, right?
Yeah, just tell me your words and phrases about women. Right. And when I did it again in 2013, I also added to the email, “Anonymity guaranteed.” And that opened up a lot of interesting avenues. Incredibly insulting.
Were the insults from both men and women?
Yes.
In equal amounts?
I didn’t track it but my impression was it didn’t make any difference.
And you used these for the 1,000 Paintings piece. Did you keep the same percentages of pejorative to nice that you had received from the emails?
No I didn’t try to do that but every once in a while I would say to myself, It’s been a little sweet around here Betty. It’s time to get a little nasty. I would make sure that there were positive things in there, but if it stayed sweet it got boring. What’s interesting about the language is the insults.
Installation view of Betty Tompkins: WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2016. Photography by Genevieve Hanson, ArtEcho LLC. Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York
Were you surprised?
Yep! I was surprised by the whole thing.
What did you think was going to happen? Did you have any sort of idea?
No idea. I wanted to use language and I wanted it to be about women and I had no preconception. I would do a group of pieces and then the next pieces would be in reaction to those so it was like an interior monologue. That was really interesting to me. I would say, These are the most dangerous paintings you’ve ever done. Because it’s language. And we all know what all this means, right, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. I would get chills. This is really offensive. But at a certain point, because I’m doing it for part of the day, for hours every day, you get insensitive to it and I would have to push it away. I couldn’t stay that freaked out forever. Right?
Right. How many years did it take?
Two and a half years of working a couple of hours a day on it every day. At a certain point, I saw the [Gerhard] Richter documentary where he was doing the paintings with the squeegees. It looked like a tremendous amount of fun. It was clearly very arbitrary. He would decide after each layer if he needed another layer. I really absorbed what he did. I thought, This is a nice idea to take over some of these big boys and feminize them. My next was Jackson Pollock. I did 100 Jacksons. And I loved doing them. I don’t know how he maintained an alcoholic depression, because I found the gesture totally joyous. I mean, I loved it. I would do them to wake myself up for the day, it’s such an upper. Then somebody on Twitter was posting Barnett Newman and I did a bunch of his.
So you were having fun with the painting part, even though you’re adding some words that possibly could be disturbing.
Well, I had decided to do this because the words in just a painted field would have looked boring.
Were you interested in having them talk to each other in terms of what they were saying as well as visually?
Yes, both. From then on to the end of the series it got very interesting to me because I had to think about two things at the same time.
It’s interesting to me that back in the early 70’s, the feminists would not include you and now, based on this project alone, I think you’re very much in the forefront of feminist art.
Right!
Did you realize it when you were doing it?
No, not when it first started, but then yeah, as soon as I started to see it. I said there’s no getting away from it. There is no rationale for not saying, yes, this is 100%, political. Look what it’s saying. I liked that it came from out there to me, and I did something to it and gave it right back out there. I was like a channeler. There was no way to say this is not political work, it would have just undermined the whole piece.
Right, and the same with your pornographic work. That was also already out there.
Absolutely.
When you are painting, do you ever think about the people behind the images?
Not in the sense that I think you mean it. I wouldn’t use an uncropped raw image where I thought the people weren’t having a good time. The first time I ran into the exploitative argument, which had to do with my sources, and that those models are being exploited, I said they look like they’re having fun to me.
What about with Women Words. Do you think about the people that wrote those words?
Yes, I do. In 2018 I did a series of what I called Insults and Laments because that’s what they are, no middle ground here for sure. I was in the inaugural show for the University of Virginia Art Center. The first couple of times I showed it I wanted it to play forward. I wanted people to participate in it. We would put the signage on the wall where I actually gave a little history, and a table with a thing of markers, index cards and push pins and invited people to add, you know, which they could and nobody signed them. They were anonymous. It was actually really hostile stuff that came out.
More than before?
More overtly misogynistic. But at the University of Virginia, they didn’t have empty space for me to do this trick, and they said well would you set up a Gmail account. And we’ll post that. So I said sure. So, you know that takes five minutes. And I got the account set up, and I started posting pieces that were in that show. I said, I’d love to see your words, phrases and stories, send them to me at WomenWords1000@gmail.com. So people started sending me things. And, you know, I promised anonymity. I would basically transfer what they sent me to an index card or a list. I would trash the emails. That guaranteed it. I have no idea who these people are. This one came through that. This basically just scratches the surface of their anger, and their experience. And I did the piece. I knew right away I was going to do that piece and I did it, and I posted it up on Instagram. And the woman who sent it got in touch with me and I wrote her back. I said, “You’re very fortunate. You lived.”
Betty Tompkins, My ex’s favorite…, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 54 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York
I have to read it now… Wow, that makes me sad.
It’s really horrifying. And I said, “You survived and I don’t know how you did it. Congratulations.” And she said, “Do you ever do prints. I’d love to have a print like this.” So, I thought well I have no idea what this woman has been been through, but I know where she came from and she’s still here, right. So, I did two digital prints. And I just sent it to her as a gift. And what’s really interesting about this one is, and pretty similar with the other one is that when men are looking at this, they start out smiling. There’s something that they think is light and so they smile. Then they get to the part that says “Well he had hobbies too.” And their smile starts to get away. And I’ve seen enough men read this and they have had second to second the same reaction.
Really.
Yeah.
What about the women?
They do just what you did. They know from the beginning,
Yeah, you know it’s not going to go well.
Yeah, and I sent it to her, and she wrote to me that she had managed to get back to school. Despite this. That she had just graduated with her undergraduate and she was going to England for graduate school.
Hopefully she left the man.
Oh, totally. You can’t write something like this, if you’re still in it. For one thing, it’s too dangerous, he’ll kill you. For another thing, to be able to at least say what you had been in makes the environment for you untenable. You have to leave. And fortunately she didn’t have children.
Wow, what a strong piece. You probably didn’t realize something like this was ever going to come from this whole thing.
Yeah. Who knew. I had people write me emails saying all these are nasty, when are you going to do a nice one. One of them says “I’m going to Jackson Pollock all over her face.” People have been incredibly supportive of this series. One of the early ones said, “Stop telling me to fucking smile”.
I know, I hate that! It’s so insulting and men don’t get it and women get it, of course. The men don’t know why you are insulted.
Part of the insult is you are walking down the street minding your own business and some guy gets in your face and says “Smile.”
Right, as if you’re there to make him happy or please him or look good for him.
Yeah, right.
It’s beyond me.
And me.
I love that you started doing the series with the old master paintings.
Oh yeah. I started with using pages from old, very soft-core photo books. This one on top of the guy peeking from behind the tree is really creepy. And creepy is my friend. I really like that.
It reminds me of Fragonard’s “The Swing”. Did you do that one?
Of course. And Bouchers. I still had those books and the remnants from them. I took out maybe 15 pages. From there I went to Weegee who I recently discovered.
I love Weegee. If you like creepy that’s a good one to work with.
Yeah, absolutely. I realized I didn’t know anything about photography. And it seemed to me I was writing on top of photographs. I thought to myself, okay, this is a fun series, you get to do maybe 40 or 50 and that will be it. For me as an artist if I’m not pushing an idea then I’m done. I really like not know what I’m doing. I was beginning to think, Well, okay, we’ve done a couple of these and I like all the photographs, but don’t really personally relate to them except for the creepiness. Then one day I woke up and I said, Art history! I just got so happy because I opened up, thousands and thousands of images.
That you love!
That I love! And the only criteria was I had to find them in a book because part of what I like about the series is that I’m not taking a photograph. I’m not taking a painting and defacing it. I’m taking a page from a book and that context is totally different. So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve done about 180.
Betty Tompkins, Apologia (Caravaggio #3), 2018, Signed, titled and dated recto., acrylic on book page, Framed, 12 x 17 5/8 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York
Do you ever wonder what those artists would think if they saw this series?
I specialize in dead people. At a certain point I did wonder.
I think they might be so fascinated actually.
I think they would, if they’re generous in spirit. Artists come in all types. Some would probably say I was defacing their work. In fact, what I think is I am disrupting their work. And I’m changing the work, entirely into something that’s mine. What I say is if you want a short definition of me as an artist, it’s that I like to take something that exists in the world, do something to it and put it back out.
© Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Betty Tompkins and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Suzanne Unrein on Henri Rousseau
Published in Painters on Paintings
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy is a dream that will never wake up. A fairy tale of time, as in Eternity. Done in the style of post-impressionist, gothic regionalism, but like a cockeyed Egyptian painting, Rousseau’s Gypsy is a bust-out, an anachronism, a mystical misfit.
Seemingly grander than its 51 x 79 inches, the lion appears like a hallucination hovering over the somnolent gypsy and her accoutrements. His mane strangely blows forward on a windless night, while his eye appears as a mesmerizing orb that plays off the moon and mandolin. The vast sky makes a silent impact with its indigo hues that hint at the coming day. Wondrous patterns mimic and undulate in surreal poetry: his mane radiates towards her garments; her foot reaches out to his hind legs; the eternal waters glide behind them and in front of a flat, wind-swept backdrop of a desert. All of these sumptuous oddities keep me coming back to this painting, along with the glistening of the gypsy’s zipper-like teeth.
Rousseau once said to Picasso, “You and I are the two most important artists of the age – you in the Egyptian style, and I in the modern one.” He was ridiculed for that and other conceits, but I can’t help thinking that illusions help us all to continue. Rousseau was a self-taught outsider and inspired to paint like William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Wonderful that he never forced himself into the framework of academia. His fantastical visions may have been a fool’s paradise but what a grand one it was: a tiger running through the rain in a tropical forest, a lion devouring a leopard among impossibly outsized lotuses and banana trees, serpents slithering out of lushness toward the ancient calls of a snake charmer.
Rousseau never left France, which may have secured his singular vision. He was outspoken about working with disparate source material to create unified worlds of his own making. Illustrations from children’s books and department stores helped create his impossible and enchanted beasts. Sketches of plants at Paris’ botanical gardens galvanized his terrain.
Twenty-four of his twenty-five jungle mashups were painted at the end of his life as if his quote “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” became the impetus for his grand finale, his trip down the rabbit hole, his adventure towards the unconditionally exotic. To me, Rousseau’s savagery in these last Edens was powerful yet delicate, simple and pure as a tune.
Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Oil on canvas, 51 x 79 inches
Verne Dawson at Gavin Brown's Enterprise
Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Bucolic landscapes give way to mysterious narratives, myths, and rituals in these latest grand and intimate paintings by Verne Dawson. A bound Prometheus, an alluring mermaid, and a crucified Jesus are instantly recognizable. Other subjects arouse only a fleeting memory.
In the show-stopping The Theft of Fire (2019), a couple steals fire from a prehistoric era while others go about their ceremonial solemnities, holding unidentifiable objects among modern architecture in the same expansive setting. Time and space are a continuum as the pleased skeleton in the foreground holds court over the contemplative characters. Dawson paints the rhythm of the natural world swiftly and fluidly, laying thick marks over thin gestures in a no-fuss manner. Rough-hewn lines and smudges create the narrative, magically conveying the turn of a foot or the terror of a duck with seemingly little effort.
A concurrent exhibition of Dawson's work is at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, with an emphasis on numerology and astronomy, and an elegy to a most likely extinct bird.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Jack Shainman Gallery
Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's contemplative works, fictitious black figures painted life-size and larger in minimal spaces, make up this two-gallery exhibition at Jack Shainman.
Thin bright whites, yellows, lime greens, and peaches are sparingly covered up by a dance of deep umbers, blue-blacks, and grays. The underpaint highlights the whites of eyes, the contours of facial features, and the outline of clothing. The figures appear silent even with outward smiles. An insistent inward gaze complements their elegant postures. Their essence is depicted with such timelessness of clothing and spaces that it produces a hologram-like remoteness.
In The Ever Exacting (2018), a man looks skeptically at an owl that looks equally suspicious of the viewer. His white-socked foot reaches out as if to move while mimicking the owl's threat to fly. Both sock and owl are painted in rich white-grays. Yiadom-Boakye is at her best here - hinting at forms with virtuoso brushstrokes, playing vibrant hues off ochres and browns - while conjuring the mysteries of paint and her imaginary subjects.
Shari Mendelson at UrbanGlass
Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Bar codes emerge out of filmy surfaces that recall ancient Roman and Islamic glass vessels in the form of animals and mythical figures. Blending observation, memory, and invention, Shari Mendelson creates spin-offs that charm and delight while conjuring histories and collective memories. She constructs them from repurposed plastic, lending a contemporary, disquieting edge.
In Deer Askos (2018), the hoofed mammal becomes an ancient vessel with inward gaze and legs sensitively tucked under a curved torso. A "best by" date is branded on its rear end, a reminder of the environmentally hazardous material that formed it.
A feline appears more house cat than lion in Sphinx with Bar Code (2018). Its human face looks wary. Its wings are clipped. With fragile front legs and a heavy top, this mythical creature seems both vulnerable and heroic in its modern form.
"Glasslike" is a reminder of objects left behind, from the artifacts of ancient civilizations to plastics that refuse to break down.
Jane Fine at Pierogi Gallery, NYC
Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Rendered in the style of pre-tech, 1970s cartoons, Jane Fine's paintings of groovy symbols, political imagery, and abstract doodling are a disquieting mix of innocent fun and a darker, Trump-era subversion.
The smaller works evoke 4-color pens with red, blue, brown, and black playing over metallic backgrounds. Flat, rounded planes break up the space while black shapes block out messages. "Sad," "Secrets," and "No" multiply and frolic in puffy lettering. Crossed out swastikas and money signs float among flowers and nonsensical speech bubbles.
In the larger So Much Winning (2018), flags tear and melt while their white stars freed from their confines shine brightly. A torn-apart fence hovers. (Good fences make good neighbors?) A partially concealed Statue of Liberty crown is smeared with red and blue. Missiles and toppled buildings pop out of abstractions. The imagery creates an ominous message amid a dynamic composition of exuberant paint on a powdery pink background.
Dr. Lakra and Mezcal Los Dos Amigos at kurimanzutto, Mexico City
Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Mexican surrealism meets sumi-e ink washes in 77 mashups by the artist and tattooist Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez, aka Dr. Lakra.
Lakra's fluid and masterful drawings combine Japanese iconography with mythical dream states. They skillfully traverse cultures and emotions in a singular vision. A monkey sees, hears, and speaks no evil while a dubious skull lies underfoot. An argyle sweater-clad fusion of snake and shriveled penis portrays the absurdity of impotency. In the poignant Yoru no hotaru (2018), an oni clutches a club in the existential darkness while peering out at fireflies bathed in their hopeful yet minuscule light.
Accompanying the exhibit is Lakra's collaboration with Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mezcal Los dos Amigos. Labels on mezcal-filled recycled liquor bottles become the canvases for the artists to conduct a dialogue through sketches and appropriated images. The project provides a wonderfully homegrown, expanded context for the sumi-e drawings.
Angela Dufresne & Louis Fratino at Monya Rowe Gallery
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line
"Glazed" combines salacious pleasures with robust sensuality in this exhibit of fresh, modestly sized paintings by Angela Dufresne and Louis Fratino.
Dufresne tantalizes and summons with comic, crazed faces that look out from brilliant, abstract backgrounds with erotic familiarity. Enticing body parts and facial features are accentuated with swaths of surprising hues while restless fingers play at sexual diddling. The rousing compositions are unified in a masterful partnering of frenetic movement and rhythmic color.
Fratino's portraits are stylized, languorous, and romantic with solid, sculptural forms that are reduced and simplified. A slow dance of flat planes and undulating forms surround geometric, contented faces rendered in deep lilacs, rusts, and grays. When not delighting in his decorative patterning of blankets, tilted picture frames and personal objects, his doodles and scratches offer a visual playground for more abstract delectations.
Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner Gallery
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line
Marlene Dumas is at the top of her game at Zwirner with pictures, some of them monumental, of voyeuristic intimacies. Painted thinly in oil, they are ephemeral and disturbing.
The large-scale canvases are around 118 x 39 inches, creating confined, coffin-like spaces for full-length figures. These portraits of vulnerability throw a gut punch. In Spring (2017) a woman, her face in shadow, pours liquid down her crotch. Her black panties cut into her rust-red legs as she balances over a lime-green stage in front of a bleak background.
In Awkward (2017) a couple stands uncomfortably toe-to-toe. Red edges force them together while the white negative space between them creates compositional tension. Their blue color makes the encounter feel powerful but fleeting.
Near the back of the show are wet-on-wet ink washes illustrating a recent edition of Shakespeare's Venus & Adonis. Dumas is in her element with the tragedy and tenderness of unrequited love.
Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line
Ursula von Rydingsvard's new, fierce, undulating sculptures take on a courageous vulnerability in these towering works (and a few smaller ones) in cedar, bronze, paper, and resin.
The cedar works are carved, sliced, bruised, and then re-constructed into ferocious pieces that haunt with fragility. In Nester (2016), eleven feet high, the wood inherently recalls the landscape. Yet its formation conjures up a caterpillar's measured crawl or an animal's tail raised in fright. The gaping holes utter silent chatter, as the rhythmic motion of the carved details relieve the overpowering mass.
The majestic, tree-like bronze of Z Boku (2017), with its lacy tendrils, appears to timidly reach for the sky, projecting strength and tenderness in equal measure.
Burrows begin tentatively at the top of Oziksien (2016), while becoming larger and seemingly louder as they plummet downward, reaching an all-out crescendo at the floor. It offers reverence to nature's power.
Ursula von Rydingsvard
Nester, 2016
cedar
131 x 55 x 54 inches
Trude Viken at Fortnight Institute
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
Through virtuoso brushstrokes, scrapes, and smears in Trude Viken's exhibit of self-portraits and couples, hidden emotional states ooze externally. Thick pigments sculpt monstrous faces in unearthly, ashen umbers with shocks of yellows, reds, and pinks. The paint is urgent and frenetic in Ensor-esque proportions.
A hundred twelve-inch canvases make up the Diary Notes series, a visual daybook of the clandestine side of the human psyche. Painted with deftness, the horrific and impotent connect through tantalizing smirks and penetrating stares. Slits of human eyes beckon for understanding as whirls of thick paint obliterate surrounding features. A head slips down a picture frame, losing its footing among a sea of acidic, calamitous, green-gray marks that offer a lifeline.
In Couples and Ghosts, anxiety is heightened with twosomes melding together in otherwise roomy compositions. Only their dissolution offers a respite from their neediness and angst.
Angelina Gualdoni at Asya Geisberg Gallery
Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
Angelina Gualdoni's "House of the New Witch" revels in the power of the female mystique, the roles of sorceress and creator, while constructing compositional disorders through spatial mashups. Interiors and still lifes mingle with shapes from the works of female artists of the past that are painted on the back of unprimed canvases and seep through as an inherited visual language. Bewitching worlds turn seemingly ordinary household objects into tools for secret ceremonies, and ancient Peruvian ceramics into magical anthropomorphic creatures.
In Cabinet Painting (2018) the stains ooze out of the walls and floor, creating an eerie and dominating lineage. A cabinet of curiosities is dimly lit in a box of emerald, blue, and violet while its doors have a warped perspective that lends form and confuses. A flattened female Moche figurine is freed from the architectural concerns and the secret world of the human-like objects, appearing as a feminist rebellion to the ancestral spirits.
Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Bronzes from the 1980s at Michael Werner Gallery, Upper East Side, NYC, 28 February through 5 May 2018
Art review by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
Per Kirkeby is a painter, a poet, and a maker of cosmogonic maps. His layers crash, collide, and build while underlying structures hold the pieces together.
Herbstbaum III (1985) has two steles holding court in a mystical forest by a river. A few marks suggest spacious surroundings outside the picture frame. A yellow totem attempts to stand erect while tipping off of its pedestal. An unflappable partner stands solid in spackled strokes of brilliant light blue.
In Untitled (1981), a landscape becomes a world, and the world becomes a language of mystery. Charcoal marks render the construction, then falter, losing their momentum. Scratches of deep blues mingle with green-blue blacks, while a pinkish gray creates a dim, diffused light that recalls Edvard Munch and the artists of Denmark's Golden Age.
Referring an earlier career in geology, Kirkeby uses his knowledge of sedimentation and stratification to forage for an inner truth, taking clues from the outside world.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Longer version:
Per Kirkeby is an artist, a poet, a maker of cosmogonic maps. Walking into the exhibit of 1980’s paintings and bronzes at the Michael Werner Gallery is being transported into a world of lost relics. Unchartered lands set up shop in your psyche. Underlying structures organize an undecipherable language that speaks loudly and persistently. Layered marks crash, collide and build. A symphony climaxes as it disintegrates.
"Herbstbaum III (Autumn Tree III),” 1985, is the first painting to insist on attention. Two steles hold court in the foreground of a mystical forest by the side of the river. A few marks suggest this spacious surrounding outside the picture frame. The yellow totem stands erect while disintegrating, it’s unflappable partner solid in thick spackled strokes of brilliant light blue. The title suggests a portrait of a tree, the painting a signpost to another world.
In “Untitled,” 1981, a landscape becomes a world becomes a language of mystery. Charcoal marks render the construction, layer upon layer, then falter, losing their momentum. Deep bluish greens turn into dark umbers, thick slabs of white take the limelight and then bow to the surrounding darkness. Nearby layers of scrawls like underbrush, rise and fall, thick and thin, awaiting their moment in the dim, diffused light. The secrets of the universe are revealed and then gone. Memory has disintegrated in erased marks.
The bronzes are slabs that once marked sacred territories, forlorn yet stoic on their isolated pedestals. The heaviness of their material seems like knights in armor. Only when their forms are transported into the paintings in rich purples and greens and black blues do they become fluid. Animated and butting against each other, they are more expressive in brushstrokes and plays of light.
While Kirkeby, 79, began his career under the influence of Fluxus, Cubism and Pop Art, his early expeditions as a geologist are the impetus for these 1980s works. His underlying knowledge of stratification and sedimentation curates the orchestra of layers and motion. Outside current art movements, Kirkeby feels unique in this contemporary world; yet in the larger context of Scandinavian art, the lineage to Edvard Munch, Asger Jorn, and the artists from the Danish Golden Age are relevant and substantial in their subdued lighting and fluidity. What makes this show remarkable and timeless is Kirkeby’s foraging for an inner truth with clues from the outside world. In an interview with Tom Van de Voorde for Bozar Literature in 2012, Kirkeby says, “I have often had the feeling that there are moments when, with the aid of my own paint, I really see the world in all its reality.”
Per Kirkeby
"Untitled", 1981
Oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 94 1/2 inches
at the Michael Werner Gallery
"Andy Woll: Western Wear" at Denny Gallery, February 15-March 25, Lower East Side, NYC
Art review by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
Andy Woll's "Western Wear" at Denny Gallery is an orgy of muscular, slippery paint. The eight works on canvas and paper, inspired by Mount Wilson and the Santa Ana winds in Los Angeles, are motifs for Woll's robust dance of color, movement, and form.
In Mt. Wilson (Santa Ana II) (2017) a thin, rusted red pigment slides over a light bluish gray ground, suggesting a hint of smog. The peak is choreographed with thick, drizzly pinks, magentas, and yellows amid a fluid structure of browns and blacks.
The large abstraction, Santa Ana (2017), is a effusive, confident work, the paint let loose from a binding structure. Wind is made visual. Brushed on and scraped off, pigments slink, slide, crash, and mingle. Juicy reds and oranges counterpoint rich, brilliant blues. Bursts of yellow peek out of green mush. The undulating grays hold the piece together with a rhythmic freedom. The exhibit is a refreshing, dynamic rhapsody of intuition.
Andy Woll
Santa Ana, 2017
oil on canvas
78 x 54 inches
at Denny Gallery
"Leon Golub: Raw Nerve" at the Met Breuer, February 6- May 27
Review by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line
"Leon Golub: Raw Nerve" at the Met Breuer is a selected survey of his work from 1940 to 2004. Inspired by political and pornographic photos, classical art, and mythology, Golub sources a wide variety of images to create his aggressive and timely works. Interrogators sneer. Mercenaries torture. Good ol' boys posture with cruel authority. Pummeled on and scraped off, the paint mimics the crudeness it depicts with a visceral impact.
While known for his enormous paintings of political violence, Golub created later works that offer a despairing, sublime beauty. Small oilstick drawings of sex workers beckon the viewer as they fade in palimpsestic marks of bright red and blue. Bite Your Tongue (2001), an apocalyptic landscape, is deftly painted with large brushstrokes. Golub portrays the dog and decapitated head using subdued hues. A colorful banner to the left offsets the somber mood, announcing "Loyalty Discipline Renewal," a warning sign about our collective mortality.
Leon Golub
"Bite Your Tongue", 2001
at the Met Breuer