Amy Cutler

Amy Cutler’s second solo at Leslie Tonkonow includes three prints and a dozen gouache-on-paper examples of her fantasy figuration, in which dour-faced women, often dressed in brightly colored and intricately patterned clothes, are set adrift in ambiguous narratives and large expanses of white space. In one etching, three matrons have birdhouses for heads; in Progeny, 2003, two pallid figures, facing each other and holding hands, give birth (through their mouths) to miniature, fully formed adults. There is a melancholic undercurrent to Cutler’s bizarre scenarios that separates these illustrations from, say, Marcel Dzama’s cartoonishness—the majority of the “women’s work” she depicts seems somehow rehabilitative, as if her wise-beyond-their-years protagonists were righting others’ wrongs. Six more of Cutler’s works are on view in the Whitney Biennial: Be sure to move the visitors in line for Yayoi Kusama’s installation out of the way to get a good look.