Guðmundur Thoroddsen

The small earthenware objects arranged on plinths in Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s show “Dismantled Spirits” evoke a garbled ancientness, a mishmash of Paleolithic, Sumerian, and Greco-Roman styles united by a scatological and phallic throughline. Pinocchio noses and double-headed dildo forms emerge from lumpy, daubed-together urns placed next to what look like rough-hewn tools and obelisk-type things. Hot Dog Mask, 2015, is a mini-monument to grossness: an imperfect green-glazed Doric-like column, interrupted by a diarrheaish cloud of Caucasian-colored clay just above its base and topped with a turd-cock (in the same fake flesh hues), reaching for the heavens. The “dismantled spirits” of the exhibition’s title are the loose ends of a transhistorical patriarchy in crisis.

Airy and magnetic works on paper elaborate this pregnant, semifictional scenario, depicting fragmented narratives of antisocial behavior—destruction, conflict, racist violence, and explosions—through rudimentary depictions of male figures in profile, often with their dicks out. In most of them, a featureless (but carefully shaded) sausage shape floats above the action like a numb deity. However, in Angry God, 2016, it grins on the floor while a giant ghoul drawn in graphite pops out of a trapezoid like a jack-in-the-box. While this work, with its Captain Caveman humor, engages in a patrilineal tradition of patheticism , it also refreshingly brings to mind other, more scathingly crude work. One thinks of Carol Rama’s brilliantly lewd drawings of snakes, tongues, shoes, and shit, and senses an homage to Nancy Spero’s urgent Vietnam War–era drawings, which deploy both ancient and childlike representational techniques to protest military atrocity and technologized male violence. Thoroddsen, in a similar style, celebrates the spectacular dissolution of all that horror ’s symbolic bedrock.