This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Dennis Kardon’s wonderfully strange paintings, Klara Liden’s green vistas and Sheryl Sutton’s mesmerizing movements.
Two Bridges
Dennis Kardon
Dennis Kardon has been painting bodies for more than 30 years, but his approach has changed significantly over that time, as you can see in “Transgressions,” a compact survey at Lubov. Some of the earliest canvases, made in 1990, capture fragments of models Kardon hired from advertisements in downtown newspapers.
There is also a wonderfully strange “Slashed Venus/Healed Venus” (1989/2024), painted after a photograph of Diego Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” (1647) that shows Velázquez’s painting after it was slashed with a meat cleaver by the suffragist Mary Richardson in 1914. (Interestingly, the same painting was targeted by climate-change protesters last year.) Kardon slashed his canvas, too, but “healed” it with thread, and made a few recent adjustments.
Other works similarly question the boundaries between bodies and paintings. “Seeing Through Paint” (2010) is an eerie depiction of a mannequin holding a kaleidoscopic orb. There are also paintings that recall the curious compositions of Paula Rego, with human and animal figures crammed into the rectilinear spaces of a canvas.
One of the oddest and most beautiful and poetic is “Metempsychosis” (2006), which takes its name from a word that means: the transmigration of the soul into another body. Here, a lavender Indian Krishna figure tangles erotically with a Rubenesque cow. The painting suggests, in seductive fashion, that painting itself is transmigration, orchestrated by the artist.
Lower East Side
Klara Liden
It’s easy to forget the uniform nature of some elements of the New York cityscape until they are highlighted in one form or another. Take the dark green (paradoxically, a shade like forest green) painted plywood temporary walls that often surround construction sites. They are required to have 12-inch square cutout “viewing panels,” through which passers-by can see what is going on behind the fencing.
In two performances captured on video and on view at Reena Spaulings, titled “Verdebelvedere” (roughly, “beautiful green vista” in Italian), Klara Liden wriggles through these diminutive openings. The videos are comical, like Buster Keaton films, although they also recall the solemn absurdity of Samuel Beckett plays and endurance performances and street performances of artists like Valie Export and Pope. L. Dressed entirely in black, Liden looks like a stagehand, mime or jewel thief. (Animals like rats and cats are also known to worm through impossibly tight spaces.)
Big slabs of silver roofing material hung on the walls and ceiling of the gallery function like paintings. Benches made from the same green construction-site plywood are also here. But these merely complement the videos, which highlight our relationship to our urban surroundings and the weird desires those surroundings elicit. Last weekend I saw a young boy crawling through one of these construction-site squares, assisted by what seemed to be his father or guardian. I guess it’s a thing, wanting to climb up and squeeze through, even if you already know what’s on the other side.
SoHo
Sheryl Sutton
A vibrant participant in the downtown performance scene in the 1970s and ’80s, Sheryl Sutton is the subject of “The Kitchen in Focus” at 47 Canal. There is a lot here: two videos (one about 27 minutes; the other, 45 minutes) and many photocopies and photographs, including a sublime portrait of Sutton by the photographer Peter Hujar. Still, I left wishing there were more videos, because Sutton is a mesmerizing performer whose slow, expert movements are arresting even — or particularly — in an era of constant distraction.
One video is a grainy black-and-white recording of “Paces” (1977), a performance originally done at the Kitchen in SoHo. In it, Sutton takes apart classical dance and everyday movement, similar to the work of people like Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown and especially Steve Paxton, who was interested in the physics of the spine and produced in-depth studies of walking. Sutton, too, raises walking and spinal awareness to a supreme level. In “Paces” she walks casually, in slow motion, and in a pre-Michael Jackson moonwalk — but always with grace and avian precision.
The second video, “Deafman Glance” by Robert Wilson, which was aired on television in 1981 and shown at the Kitchen in 1982, relies even more on focused and controlled movement. It stars Sutton, who is Black, as a mother going about her household duties and then stabbing her two sons. It’s an excellent document of experimental television, but the fact that the victims are Black boys, even if there is no blood — the film is stylized and theatrical — is significant. A news release on the wall, from 1982, says Sutton’s performance asks “questions of morality, and mortality.”
In the present moment, though, Sutton’s virtuosic, dance-like movement feels tied not just to downtown performance and so-called transgressive TV, but also to larger narratives of racialized violence and how it is enacted with numbed precision.
See the September gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in October appeared first on New York Times.
