Our art selection for the summer 
4 columns
Should I compare you to a summer day? This art is more beautiful…
Nicole Eisenman: What happenedInstallation view. Photo: Shelby Ragsdale. © MCA Chicago. Pictured, top row, far left: Capture, cut off penis, stuff penis, attach to belt, adjust1994.
Following up on our summer album roundup, this week we’re showcasing our favorite summer art exhibits, some of which readers can still see in Chicago and New York. Surprisingly, it turns out our female critic team was excited about an all-female artist lineup to create some special hot-girl late-summer vibes before September hits us.
• • •
Moyra Davey: Horse Opera, Higher Images Generation,
16 Main Street, Brooklyn, June 12 to 26 July 2024
Reviewed by Margaret Sundell
Moyra Davey: Horse OperaInstallation view. Courtesy of Moyra Davey and Higher Pictures.
Shot in and around the artist’s home in upstate New York, Horse Opera is Moyra Davey’s pandemic project. In the film’s voice-over, she talks about a text message from a friend that captures the spirit of lockdown in a single word: “Bardo,” it says – the threshold state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Bardo is also mentioned in a New York Times Article describing the different phases of a dance party with DJ David Mancuso (the legendary gatherings were known under the term “Loft” and first took place in the 1970s).
Davey abandons the first person, the form of address in her other film works, and switches to the third person in Horse Opera to tell the story of Elle (“she” in French), a regular customer of the loft. While a chronological arc is suggested, Davey blurs time and describes each party in the present tense. She talks about being high, feeling alternately anxious and euphoric, admiring people under the disco ball and waiting endlessly for the bathroom.
Davey’s narrative is accompanied by images of her rural surroundings. Often viewed through a telescope, one sees birds, a bear, but above all horses – running, turning to face the camera, urinating in streams. At first the juxtaposition seems incongruous, but over time a dialogue develops. When Davey wraps a horse’s ankle in brightly colored fabric, she might be dressing it for a night on the town; when the horses nudge, they are social actors, like the partygoers mingling; when they pass, it is toward a freedom one only feels on the dance floor.
• • •
Yto Barrada: part-time abstract artist, curated by Elisabeth Sherman, International Center of Photography, 79 115th Street, New York City,
May 22-September 2, 2024
Reviewed by Ania Szremski
Yto Barrada, Candy 42016. Courtesy of Pace Gallery. © Yto Barrada.
At first glance, it all looks… beautiful. Beautiful geometric abstractions, created from innocuous sources – sewing instructions, darkroom materials, children’s toys. But as Paris-born Moroccan artist Yto Barrada has said, “Misdirection is important for artists and magicians,” and as the title of her solo exhibition at the International Center for Photography makes clear, she is only a part-time abstractionist.
We begin with twelve hypnotic pictograms, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, black and white, the black a sensually textured background, the white a series of superimposed lines that inevitably recall the black paintings of Frank Stella, a very famous abstractionist to whom Barrada has referred elsewhere. Stella’s paintings live in museums and are worth a lot of money. Barrada’s pictograms show practice sheets for sewing apprentices, which are worth nothing. But they are just as beautiful. Why not?
Barrada has described herself as a “thing finder” in the style of Pippi Longstocking. The other series shown here (such as sweetbased on candy wrappers Barrada had in her bag when she went into the darkroom) all grew out of this practice. All are contingent, improvisational, and wonderfully easy to look at. All are also about work – artworks and work of various kinds. Work that can be difficult to recognize.
In the largest gallery there is a monitor on the floor on which the four-minute 16mm film is played in a continuous loop A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners (2014). This is the activation of a sculpture by the artist from 2003, a table-sized model of a city. In the film, a procession of three black Mercedes toys leads an unseen official visitor through the city, whereupon palm trees grow out of holes in the ground, the scrubby facades of the buildings along the street turn over to reveal clean fronts, and the still-flying Moroccan flags suddenly come to fluttering life. The cars disappear and everything returns to how it was. Misdirection. Things that are beautiful to look at may conceal something that is difficult to see. The artist as a magician who leads us astray and draws our attention to something real.
• • •
Maja Ruznic: The world is not ending, Karma, 22 and 188 East Second Street, New York City, June 26-August February 23, 2024
Reviewed by Johanna Fateman
Maja Ruznic: The world is not endingInstallation view. Courtesy of the artist and Karma. © Maja Ruznic. Pictured left: Arrival of the Wild Gods II2023.
At Karma, four massive paintings, like murals or picture windows, depict astral yet earthy scenes of mythological significance in the most immersive—or teleporting—show of my summer. Maja Ruznic’s smaller works on paper (which fill another room of the Second Street gallery) are also great: semi-abstract compositions of biomorphic forms and geometric frameworks punctuated by a mysterious lexicon (glowing eyeballs and threadlike lines suggesting umbilical, narrative, and psychic connections between things). But it’s in the panoramic canvases of The world is not endingfor which she switches from gouache to oil, the painter’s rich palette allows her to take on the vibrancy of precious stones and to render her pictures with glazed veils of color so that they appear as if lit by torches, reflected in dark ponds or shaded by forest canopies.
Ruznic, who had two paintings in the just-concluded Whitney Biennial—adorable wildcards in a show focused on figurative painting—was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1983 and fled the Bosnian war as a child. She lived with her mother in European refugee camps before settling in California in 1995. (She now lives in New Mexico.) Her personal history and our geopolitical present inform the themes of cataclysm and displacement, which are palpable in her arrangements of ghostly and alien figures. The dark place of star lines and electricity shows his translucent wanderers in profile, embraced by a hazy, sky-blue and chlorophyll-colored architecture of concentric, inverted arches. I thought of Marc Chagall at his most trippy and folkloric, as well as the occultist painter Paulina Peavy, who channeled the spirit of Lacamo to express an ancient, cosmological past (and utopian future). And if I had to choose, I would choose Ruznic’s smoldering, autumn-colored Arrival of the Wild Gods II is my favourite work – a forest drama full of curious and grieving visitors; a pagan Pietà with the figure of the evil Mary and a collapsing corpse in the centre; a tragedy that promises rebirth.
• • •
Nicole Eisenman: What happened curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, MCA Chicago Presentation curated by Jadine Collingwood and Jack Schneider, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, April 6-September February 22, 2024
Reviewed by Aruna D’Souza
Nicole Eisenman: What happenedInstallation view. Photo: Shelby Ragsdale. © MCA Chicago. Pictured left: The meeting2008.
Given her status in the art world, it is extraordinary that Nicole Eisenman: What happened—now on its final stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—is the artist’s first major exhibition. But even the subtle self-deprecation of the title (a career is a summary of events, nothing more, nothing less) is a clue that she prefers to stay out of the spotlight. Indeed, this exhibition (consisting of over a hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, and an installation) makes it clear that her work is as much about the communities Eisenman was a part of as it is about her own endlessly imaginative capacity for formal invention. Her monumental group portraits, full of artist cameos and her penchant for art-historical bricolage, bring a lot of other guests to the party—literally, in the case of Seder (2010), in which each participant is portrayed in a radically different style, with allusions to Renoir, Bonnard, Rockwell, Dubuffet, Guston and others.
Eisenman came of age at the height of the culture wars, and her early drawings reflect a black humor and an insistence on joy that she and other queer friends used as a shield and a weapon. A 1992 drawing, Untitled (Lesbian Recruitment Status)embodies the worst fears of right-wing homophobes. The misogyny in Capture, cut off penis, stuff penis, attach to belt, adjust (1994), drawn in the style of a baroque battle scene, is delightful. But there is also tenderness and vulnerability, as in a picture of an abandoned patient in a therapist’s office (The meeting2008) or the orange mixture of anger and sadness in Finish (2011). Emotionally speaking, there is something here for everyone.
