A New Level of Ambition in Art from 3 Women

Fall tends to be a great time in the art world of New York City. The weather can be great. Back-to-school excitement reigns as galleries reopen, sometimes at new addresses, often with new shows. Even the inconvenient arrival of art fairs earlier this year during Labor Day week didn’t dampen things.

As always, the most talked about of a new season comes from gallery solos, which show individual artists making changes and taking new risks. Going to the galleries is, in a way, a search for such signs of growth and the cultural optimism they entail.

Three of the most exciting gallery shows right now feature the latest efforts from well-known artists: Lisa Yuskavage at Chelsea, Mickalene Thomas on the Upper East Side and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at TriBeCa. We see what’s most on their minds, which is reflected in the distinctly different and improved work fresh out of the studio, often completed during the pandemic. All of this makes it very satisfying to visit and ponder over women, especially in the way they deal with their lives.

I would respect more than Lisa Yuskavage Business. Eroticized Kewpie dolls and pornographic allusions wrapped in a saccharine monochromatic atmosphere effectively conveyed the inability of men to view women as anything but sex objects, and the damage this perspective inflicts on both the seer and the seen. Still, the points that the artist often voiced seemed primarily conceptual, and the oily surfaces and exaggerated light seemed contrived, unpleasant.

Without much change, Yuskavage’s latest pictures on Zwirner are much better. His style kept a tune. His pictures are more blank; The objects are still mysterious but there is little kitsch. Color, light, and space are more refined and translucent, and sometimes accompanying shadows add momentary abstractions in the background. Topics are more mature; We see women looking serious in the studios. References to European art abound. Examples of Yuskavage’s earlier paintings also exist in the background of some paintings as signs of his growth.

One of the best paintings is “Yellow Studio”, which depicts a woman sitting alone in a yellow light. Looking at the soles of the feet “The Thorny Boy” (Also known as “spinario”), the famous Greco-Roman statue; He wears a medieval cloak on his head, familiar from paintings by artists from Bruegel to Vermeer. If the women are poorly dressed, the men are naked and especially wimpy.

In the bright green light of “Master Class”, which shows a gorgeous abstract painting in the background, there is little doubt that the woman judging a painting of a young man is a master. Even if her boobs are bare and her jeans are zipped open (and she can judge something other than a painting), she’s in charge.

Sometimes Yuskavage’s anger is quite direct, as in “Scissor Sisters,” named for a group and lovemaking position. It shows three tall women standing on a grassy hillside, armed with short swords or guns. They’re lithe and topless, but not to be teased. In a much smaller work, the title of which cannot be published here, we see only a woman’s face and her two hands, which she held close to her, and her middle fingers, raising.

Yuskavage made his paintings much more attractive officially. The four big studio paintings are as much color studies as narratives. Different shades of the dominant color define the vibrant shapes of the furniture and repeat the swatches taped to the wall. Examine the background for themselves; They are breathtaking in different ways.

Mickalene Thomas: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Mickalene Thomas’ show at Lévy Gorvy was her first solo performance in New York in seven years, so some sort of change was expected. He did more than he gave. And in accordance with his independent personality, he did not attend the gallery.

In a sense, to celebrate black women, their bodies and powerful forms of being, sometimes in terms of their outfits and interiors, she does what she always does, subtly combining a skillful combination of allowance and paint, accentuated with glitter and sequins. ; sometimes by posing them as white men or women in famous modernist paintings (for example, Manet’s “Olimpia” or his”Lunch on the Grass”). Typically, his earlier works had absolute splendor in their scale, bright, opaque colours, thick surfaces, and rich patterns. Furnished installation pieces expanded these paintings into three dimensions.

Now Thomas had taken her style into a new, less hedonistic realm. Leaving the scale and grandeur of his work intact, he has stripped everything of using photography in various ways, emphasizing transparent layers rather than opacity. Each new work begins with a greatly enlarged photograph of a half-naked Black woman, titled month and year of publication, published in Jet magazine in the 1970s. And every woman gets some privacy from the various photo-based images and patterns that Thomas collages on their bodies like little shields. At other times compositions are reduced to meticulously applied sequin lines. The result is a kind of flattened Cubism, whose architectural clarity and scarcity have an appearance in the process. In “May 1977” some areas are filled with hand-drawn textures; Parts of the collage appear to have been taped in “March 1976.” From start to finish, scribbled instructions – “Silkscreen Print” or “Paint” – appear in blank spaces.

In many ways, including their transparency, these works engage the audience in more complex ways than before. They state that for Thomas, the future has unlimited possibilities.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor: Promising Future

In the past, Alison Elizabeth Taylor extraordinary wood inlay tables seemed interesting primarily for bravura crafts. Working mostly from photographs and laser cutting (mostly) of her own, Taylor turned small pieces of various wood veneers into jigsaw-like pieces that fit together to create detailed images. In his first few shows at James Cohan, he limited his subjects primarily to things made of wood, whether it’s a tree stand or the interior of a log cabin. He perfected a kind of woodgrain grisaille that became uniform. Taylor seemed to love the wood too much to violate it with an unnatural color.

After temporarily bleaching her in the 2017 show in this gallery, Taylor said: dive into a full palette – Intense, jewel-like tones that tend to steal the show. His repertoire now includes painted finishes, plastered photographs (like the ornate swimming pool curtains in “Midwinter”), as well as real textures laser-cut from photographs (like the rough stone pavement of the pool). Its subject matter, though not quite urban, is no longer so rustic. A scene from the homely warmth of a small town, “Night at the PS” gives us a sea of ​​contrasting backs and hairs from the audience’s point of view to a student play.

Images look more complex than ever before. “Sculpture Inc.” focuses on a mesmerizing glance from a store door to shelves filled with tiny shiny sculptures. Only secondarily, you notice the outside of the shop, an intricate arrangement of painted brick, peeling paint, bare brick and graffiti. Another showdown is the “Rock Shop,” displaying sliced ​​agates and geodes in colors that come to the brink of artificial – each stone is a small painting with glittering edges. Much of the rugged southwest landscape outside the window is also painted.

It’s great to see Taylor expand her art, but marquetry remains her focus. The show’s biggest work, “Meet There,” takes us into familiar territory, but with a new closeness, showing us the dizzying extravagance of mostly unpainted wood grains in a forest of undersized trees and twigs. Only the pink sky of a fading sunset has been painted. Taylor’s art brings to wood what Lisa Lou brought to beads: a new level of ambition and artistry with broad appeal that insists on being taken seriously.

Mickalene Thomas: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

By November 13, Lévy Gorvy, 909 Madison Ave., 73rd Street, (212) 772-2004; levygorvy.com.tr

Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings

Until October 23, David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 727-2070; davidzwirner.com.tr

Alison Elizabeth Taylor: Promising Future

Until October 23, James Cohan, 48 Walker Street, TriBeCa, (212) 714-9500; jamescohan.com.tr