Endless painting
Two recent New York gallery shows
Most New York galleries show painting most of the time. The reasons for this may have less to do with the prestige of the medium than its unit economics, as the sculptor Josh Kline suggested in a recent essay in October on the stifling of contemporary art by New York City rents. Painting isn’t just cheaper to make; it’s also cheaper to store, ship, and display than sculpture, and compared to video or installation work, it’s easier to sell to wealthy collectors with walls to fill. There are other factors, too, not least of which is a cultural bias toward the shareable, postable, forgettable image. Painting takes up less physical and digital room, so it occupies an ever greater share of our cultural attention.
Space and its limitations were the implicit theme of the painter Emily Kraus’s impressive New York solo debut, “In Relation,” at Luhring Augustine (April 11–June 13). The six expansive, articulate abstractions on display were made with a mechanism that Kraus contrived while at the Royal College of Art to paint at scale in the eight-by-eight-foot studio she was assigned. Using four shower rods, Kraus made a scaffold around which she stretched large pieces of canvas she sewed together to create a kind of cube. She worked inside this room within a room, painting in oil on the canvas and then pulling it around the frame. The mechanism has changed a bit since her school days, but the results are similar: dense echoes of sinuous lines and clustered splatters, as if a Pollock had gotten stuck in an inkjet printer. The paint is striated with tendril-like creases left behind by the canvas’s uneven passage over the rollers.
Each of the paintings exhibited this spring posed a kind of paradox: they seemed equal parts manual and mechanical, and it was never quite clear to me which marks were made by the machine, and which were left by Kraus’s own hand. “The Draw of the Moon,” a vast painting 10 feet tall and nearly 19 feet wide, was made up of two canvases set close together; these were presumably once sewn together, into a single surface. The half-pipe of dark greenish black that dominated the left canvas seemed more organic, while the stringy tidal wave of splattered but regularly repeating lines on the right half of the painting bore the telltale signs of reproduction. The tops and bottoms of the two canvases were punctuated by black marks, whose staccato rhythm recalled a roll of 35mm film. (Kraus’s mother, Mariana Cook, is a noted portrait photographer; her father, Hans P. Kraus, Jr., is the leading American dealer of early photography.) Étienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotographs” of motion — vaulting pole jumpers or birds in flight shown in multiple ghostly exposures in a single frame — were somewhere in the background, particularly in the (relatively) smaller “Hopping Time,” a canvas about 5.5 by 10 feet whose single defining motif, a cursive squiggle, ricocheted across the whole canvas.
But the paradox was also spatial: abstraction abandons illusionistic perspective to embrace the flatness of the picture plane. Yet Kraus’s paintings always implied, and sometimes evoked, the three dimensions of the studio space, most literally in “Anemoi” (“winds” in ancient Greek). The piece was once again a diptych, though most of the paint was concentrated on the right half, in two large, vertical fields of white and dried-blood red, from which purple and green pigment seemed to flow leftward, in two long tails, like wind. But instead of hanging flat on a single wall, these two wings were mounted at a right angle in a corner, so as to become, in a touch of theatricality, a half-room you could walk into. If action painting — the ultimate macho enterprise of postwar American art — recorded the mark of the maker, these paintings reflected the contemporary material conditions of their making. As those conditions change, though, it’s hard to imagine how Kraus will continue to use her painterly prosthesis without its novelty decaying into gimmick. She could find herself painted into a corner. Pollock only dripped for three years or so.
If Kraus used her machine to defy the constraints of her workspace and to push against the flatness of abstraction, Lisa Yuskavage, in her latest paintings and new experiments in collage at David Zwirner (May 14–June 26), plunged ever further into the studio and the perspectival depths of figuration. (The Drift receives funding from David Zwirner.) With her complex imaginary scenes and rigorous compositions, Yuskavage has always been as much or more an intellectual painter as she is a sensualist; there has perhaps always been an implied studio in her pictures. Here, in paintings mostly set in imaginary studios and filled with quotations of her previous work, you felt as if you were being let into the back of the shop.
That was in part because of the presence in the show of several studies, which you could compare to the finished works. But, as in Kraus’s paintings, process was also within and upon the work itself: Yuskavage’s pastel and collage pieces foregrounded their own madeness, and, in the studio paintings — which included several self-portraits of the painter at work — Yuskavage employed here for the first time collage’s painterly equivalent, trompe l’oeil.
“Endless studio (portal)” was the largest and most ambitious of the paintings, and in a way the key to the show. In the left-most square of the triptych, a balloon-bellied young girl with a cherry-round nipple carried a steaming cup of coffee (a quotation from Yuskavage’s 1995 painting “The Good”). She crossed in front of a green painting on an easel of a woman in peasant dress (Yuskavage’s own “Nel’zah’s” from 2012), and behind a glorious peacock (straight from Girolamo dai Libri’s “Madonna and Child with Saints,” at the Met), which stared out into a Venetian sky. Empty canvas stretchers tumbled out of the middle panel, from behind a large nocturne (a Whistler?) being painted by a woman fully clothed in blue. She was smaller than you might have expected, even diminutive; she stood on a platform and poked or pointed at the shining white-yellow moon. Leaning at the bottom left side of the platform was a mustard-yellow rectangle, maybe a canvas but maybe just a shape, which presaged the geometric proliferation in the right panel. There, instead of paintings, were simply yellow and green and occasionally orange and blue forms, some square and attached to the wall like accumulated Post-its, some ovaline and leaning against the wall, which was also mustard yellow. There were an allegory’s worth of forms among them: a brown stool bore a book and another coffee cup. A pinkish stick leaned against a piece of trompe l’oeil legal pad paper, and a mysterious yellow beam rested a bit further down the wall. Two little balls, one yellow, one green, rested on the floor, along with a third coffee cup and some paper scraps. A few nested file boxes completed the mess. One seemed almost to jump out of the painting, in a weird perspectival trick, but when you stepped back it seemed to exist in a plane in front of the canvas you didn’t quite realize was there, in which the girl also seemed to be moving.
We went from the world within the painting to the scene of painting to the surface of the painting, from figuration to figuring to the point where figuration resolves into a species of abstraction. For Yuskavage, the imaginary studio is endless. She proves that painting is, too.
This is the June installment of Max Norman’s column on contemporary art.
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