“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

To my mind, Gladys Nilsson is the reigning queen of weird-ass figuration and has been for more than fifty years. She was a founding member of the Hairy Who, a group of six Chicago artists who showed together in the mid- to late 1960s and borrowed equally from high modernism and the sordid ranks of populist art to create irreverent images and objects. Their work seemed designed to challenge the tyranny of good taste and decorum, especially as defined by their contemporaries in New York and across Europe.

While many of her colleagues borrowed significantly from straight porn, underground comics,

Tree after tree, each stripped barren and leafless: not the proverbial tree of life, but something else—a symbol of death, a memento mori of suffering and pain, its “bark swollen,” and “obscene,” akin to the chestnut tree that revealed its nothingness to Antoine Roquentin, the hero of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938).

Why does Ursula von Rydingsvard make art? “To survive,” she said in a 2019 interview, “because it’s a place to put my pain, my sadness.” Born in Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father, she endured, alongside her family (her parents, four brothers, and two sisters),

This was June Leaf’s first show in her adopted hometown since the artist’s 2016 exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, “Thought Is Infinite,” which focused mainly on her drawings. And while the presentation at Ortuzar Projects included several pieces dating as far back as the 1970s, the accent was firmly on work created since the Whitney show. As ever, Leaf has been equally active in sculpture and painting, with drawing as the inevitable fount of inspiration. Her art seamlessly and beguilingly stitches together naturalistic detail and abstract structure with elusive symbolism

In an arresting black-and-white photograph, two figures in profile stand face-to-face before a dark screen, which is partially surrounded by a pale border. Their heads are tightly bound together, completely obscured by what appears to be white gauze—calling to mind the linen strips ancient Egyptians used to wrap their dead nobles—while their bodies are strapped to one another with what may be a pair of black leather belts. The towering model on the left appears to have no arms, yet the much smaller one on the right clearly does, and they’re folded around the other’s waist. Whether their intertwining

Everybody knows the best kind of party is a doll party. I mean the kind thrown by trans women, who at some point in the past decade began using the word doll to describe themselves. The term was not used that way during the 1980s and ’90s, the period when Greer Lankton (1958–1996) produced her lifelike doll sculptures, even though the trans artist deeply identified with her works. But the coincidence made “Doll Party,” her show at Company—and her first New York outing in eight years—all the more irresistible. As poet Kay Gabriel once wrote to me, “Dolls are pretty and pliable, something to play

Corporeal forms and abstract shapes collide on unprimed, earthen fields in Kaveri Raina’s breathtaking paintings. The first time I saw them, in a 2019 group show at New York’s Luhring Augustine, their intense hues stopped me in my tracks. Reencountering her work in this solo show, I was struck anew by the augmented feeling in their forms. Created under the duress caused by the Trump presidency and the pandemic, her images transmit a combustive energy. No wonder Raina has analogized their affect to a heating kettle right before it screams.

In an era in which artworks often sacrifice passion for

The mesmerizing art of Grant Wallace (1868–1954), a phantasmagoric amalgamation of theosophical tract, circus flyer, and beauty advertisement—all of which is shot through with a generous dose of science fiction—defies tidy categorization. Exhibited for the first time, thirty-one of the artist’s drawings, discovered by his great-grandchildren in 2021, were on display at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. The illustrations, executed between 1919 and 1925, were intended for different books Wallace had planned on publishing, one of which he characterized as “an astral album of autographic scripts and self-portraits.”

On a December evening in 1933, an English teenager named Patrick Leigh Fermor boarded a steamship in London bound for the Hook of Holland. Disembarking the next morning, Fermor walked into the snowy Dutch countryside with a rucksack full of clothes and gear from an army surplus shop to begin what would become a thirteen-month journey, on foot, to Istanbul. Along the way, he slept in workhouses, barns, and castles and drank with farmers, aristocrats, and budding Nazis, finally arriving at his destination on New Year’s Day 1935. Though he had recorded his experiences in journals—and eventually