Rivane Neuenschwander
Through Oct. 24. Tanya Bonakdar, 521 West 21st Street, Manhattan; 212-414-4144, tanyabonakdargallery.com.
When the Museum of Modern Art inaugurated its latest expansion almost exactly a year ago — in another era — Rivane Neuenschwander’s installation “Work of Days” was among the most subtle and serene of the celebratory exhibitions. It consisted of a room tiled entirely with squares of white paper embedded with little specks — dust, hair and what not — the stuff continually floating to earth all around us, every second of every day. It was a perfect summation of this Brazilian artist’s modesty, and her love of the random, the collaborative and the ephemeral.
But things have changed for the worse since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and its frequent mishandling, especially in Brazil and the United States. Ms. Neuenschwander, like many people, is experiencing a certain rage. As a result, she has made some of the most furiously beautiful — and nonephemeral — works of her career: most notably the five violent, gorgeously colored tapestries and five small paintings on wood that are part of her series “Tropics: Damned, Orgasmic and Devoted.” They form the centerpiece of her unsettling exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar.
Inspired by erotic Japanese woodcuts, these works feature piles of garments and entangled, vividly hybrid creatures whose parts are variously human, insect, reptile, plant or imaginary. Blood flows amid scenes of mutual, possibly ritualistic, destruction whose victims are apparently female but whose conflict reflects the state of the world. There are several visual echoes, including Goya’s “The Disasters of War” and the elegantly perverse beings of Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist paintings. (Contributing to the intensity: the creative textures of the tapestries’ red areas, improvised by their weavers.)
The tapestries are introduced by two dozen small gouache drawings of monsters in black and red, based on children’s renderings of their most pressing fears — including snakes, volcanoes war, horror films — culled from workshops conducted by the artist. A more characteristically conceptual piece involving soldiers’ postcards home comments on the senselessness of war. And finally, “Fear of,” a small textile combining appliqué, embroidery and paint whose sewn-on letters spell out some of the present’s daily terrors like fear of virus, fear of war, culminating in fear of the end of the world. This vividly vehement thing — populated by some of the monsters from the small gouaches — was made by Ms. Neuenschwander as she sheltered in place this summer. It is wonderful: small but concentrated, with a robust, unfussy handiwork that is rare in her art. It highlights a propensity that could be allowed to shine more often.
ROBERTA SMITH
Emma Amos
Through Nov. 7. Ryan Lee, 515 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-397-0742, ryanleegallery.com.
Part of what I’ve found difficult to handle about this year has been the constant uncertainty. Between the pandemic, national politics and climate change, much of life is in dizzying flux. Ryan Lee’s Emma Amos exhibition “Falling Figures” captures this feeling better than any other art I’ve seen since March. And most of the work was made between 1988 and 1992.
Ms. Amos, who died in May at 83, was a doggedly inventive artist. She used figurative painting, textiles and print media — sometimes all three in one piece — to represent the complexity of her identity as an African-American woman and to push back on the ways that Black life has been treated in white Western art. One of her motifs was the theme of the current show: figures falling or flying through abstract space, which is often painted with expressionistic jags and bright swaths of color.
The characters in these works seem caught in physical and existential states of suspension. Many have their mouths open in expressions that suggest wonder as much as alarm — or, in the case of the artist’s self-portrait in “The Overseer” (circa 1992), a scream of righteous rage. Sometimes their bodies seem to float upward more than down, like the ghostly white figures in “Thurgood and Thelonious, Some Names to Name Your Children” (1989), who appear caught in a cosmic swirl. Rarely alone, they often look at or reach out for others — in “Will You Forget Me” (1991), the artist grips a portrait of her mother — suggesting that falling is not a solitary but a social experience.
Patterned pieces of hand-woven and African fabric appear in every piece, appended as clothing and used for framing; they add stability and exuberance. Although she never loses sight of the startling fear of tumbling into the unknown, Ms. Amos also contends that it offers a possibility worth celebrating: that of breaking free. JILLIAN STEINHAUER
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