Chloe Wyma

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  print March 2023

  Wael Shawky

  Unlike the complex marionette dramaturgies of his renowned 2010–15 “Cabaret Crusades” video trilogy, Wael Shawky’s new film, Isles of the Blessed (Oops! . . . I forgot Europe) (all works 2022), the centerpiece of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery, is condensed to a single moving image: Seated at a hearth, a lone puppet of an elderly woman recounts one of Europe’s foundational myths in Arabic, Shawky’s native tongue. She tells us a tale about Europa, a beautiful Phoenician princess who is abducted and raped by Zeus on the island of Crete. Europa’s brother Cadmus, endeavoring to find his missing

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  print February 2023

  Robert Colescott

  “In the twentieth century,” artist Robert Colescott wrote in 1990, “an archetype has developed that is designed to sell products—products that include war. Diabolically effective, she has big breasts, long legs, slender hips, and is usually blond with big blue eyes. She promises pleasure, active companionship, and social status.” While the painter’s satires of old masters and chestnuts—most famously, of Emanuel Leutze’s hagiographic Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851—have been celebrated as acidulous detournements of art history, his images of women (often the fetishized, aspirational type

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  print December 2022

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Drawn from the holdings of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware and hosted by the oldest bibliophilic society in North America, “Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young” was a bookish yet buoyant romp worthy of its subject. The curators of the sesquicentennial exhibition, Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret D. Stetz, stuffed the second floor of the venue’s neo-Georgian town house with amusing bagatelles and ephemera—from a teenage self-caricature as Whistler’s mother to a letter recounting flirtations with the occult (specifically, an “unpleasant experience with a Planchette”

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  print October 2022

  POETRY IN NOTIONS

  “HER ESTABLISHMENT in the Place Vendôme is a devil’s laboratory,” Jean Cocteau wrote in 1937, when Elsa Schiaparelli, ensconced in her Paris salon with a view of Napoleon’s priapic column, was the foremost couturier in Paris. “Women who go there fall into a trap, and come out masked, disguised, deformed, or reformed, according to Schiaparelli’s whim.” Her patrician brand of Surrealism—which married outré maximalism with minatory elegance, “the richest laces” with “the most austere cassocks”—was the dernier cri. Her so-called wooden-soldier silhouette, with its irreproachable shoulders and

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  print October 2022

  “The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present”

  From Christoph Jamnitzer’s buxom amoretti to Wolfgang Hieronymus Von Bömmel’s scrollwork beasts, from François Boucher’s conchiferous Rococo to Robert Adam’s gentrified classicism, from Louis H. Sullivan’s Midwestern mandalas to Prophet Isaiah Robertson’s millenarian millwork, from Wendy Red Star’s critical interpolations in the photographic archive of Apsáalooke costume to Tom Hovey’s faithful renderings of cakes from The Great British Bake Off (2010–), “The Clamor of Ornament”—billed as “the most ambitious omnibus exhibition The Drawing Center has undertaken in a decade”—embraced its topic

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  print Summer 2022

  CHIMERICAL ROMANCE

  Humbert was the most beautiful boy in the town.
  He had blue eyes and golden curls.
  He was very beautiful, but he was nasty.
  He liked putting rats in the beds of his sisters.
  The little girls cried.
  One day, Rose, his sister, put a crocodile in his bed.
  “AI” yelled Humbert, “I’m afraid there’s a crocodile in my bed!”
  But Humbert was so beautiful the crocodile gave him an agreeable smile. Humbert and the crocodile had become friends.
  The child was even nastier than he was before because he could go everywhere with the crocodile.
  
  —Leonora Carrington
  

  PAINTED IN THE 1950S on the walls of her sons’ bedroom and

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  print May 2022

  Dorothea Tanning

  The show here by Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), “Doesn’t the Paint Say It All?,” was being billed by Kasmin as “the most comprehensive solo presentation of her work for US audiences in decades.” It was, however, by no means a retrospective. Absent were the romantic costume and set designs Tanning confected for George Balanchine’s ballets between 1945 and 1953; her underknown, fantastically perverse biomorphic soft sculptures from the mid- to late 1960s; and, perhaps most conspicuously, her tightly worked mythopoeic paintings of the 1940s, the most famous examples of which—including the preternatural

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  print March 2022

  Martín Ramírez

  Two locomotives billowing black smoke dart in and out of mountain tunnels, snaking through a psychedelic topography of strobing parabolas hatched with delicate traces of yellow pencil. The drawing, Untitled (trains and tunnels) A, B (all works cited, ca. 1958–61), was perhaps the most electrifying piece in “Memory Portals,” an exhibition of Martín Ramírez’s art at Ricco/Maresca. The train as motif, inset here with dark windows that echoed the punctured building facades appearing throughout the show, is a recurring feature of Ramírez’s work, an emblem resonant with the themes of itinerancy and

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  print February 2022

  Genieve Figgis

  Flanked by attendants bearing platters of grapes in a grand tepidarium, a naked baigneuse voluptuates on a velvet ottoman, proffering for our delectation her stippled pubes, spiraling breasts, and tight sphincter of a mouth. The setting—Matisse’s Morocco by way of Caesar’s Palace—is superintended by two porcine, friezelike visages placed into decorative roundels. In Roman lady with two servants (all works cited, 2021), Genieve Figgis serves up the Caligulan extravagance of the ancient baths with her signature painterly finesse and deflationary humor, right on time for our own age of imperial

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  print February 2022

  FALSE PROFIT

  “THE ONLY THING worth a dime in here is her,” Anna Delvey says as she gestures, champagne flute in hand, toward a black-and-white photograph of a young babushka-clad woman—somewhere between gamine on the go and Hitchcock heroine—floating past a brick apartment tower, a look of cool determination fixed in her liquid-lined eyes. It’s the second episode of Shonda Rhimes’s Netflix caper Inventing Anna, and our protagonist, inhabited with steely grace by Julia Garner, is at a benefit auction with fictitious lifestyle mogul Talia Mallay (Jennifer Esposito), persuading her to buy Cindy Sherman’s Untitled

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  print January 2022

  Shannon Cartier Lucy

  A pet Dalmatian cut open on a dissection table, six blackberries strung together with a needle and thread, four pairs of large white panties neatly aligned on an Anatolian rug: The paintings of Shannon Cartier Lucy present a magic realism of precise displacements, suffused with soft kink and macabre sentimentality. The exhibition here, “The Loo Table,” was a follow-up to her 2020 breakthrough debut at Lubov. It was titled after a type of eighteenth-century card table with a foldable top, but the press release encouraged a slippery associative logic: “Loo is the loser, the runaway, a lullaby.”

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  print December 2021

  Paul Thek

  A moldering loin of carrion glistened within a Plexiglas case like a precious geode in “Relativity Clock,” a small Paul Thek survey at Alexander and Bonin. Butchered to reveal an interior cavity of incarnadine entrails and pearlescent fat, Untitled (Meat Piece with Chair), 1966, is from the artist’s well-known 1964–67 series “Technological Reliquaries”—waxworks of severed body parts and chunks of flesh enclosed in sleek vitrines. This piece in particular had a unique feature: a top compartment that housed a miniature bronze chair—a premonition, perhaps, of Thek’s 1968 series of “Chair” sculptures,