Thornton Dial’s “Flying Tiger,” Thomas Eggerer’s protest painting, Harriet Korman’s brilliant canvases, Sheida Soleimani’s portraits of Iranian-U.S. relations, and Etel Adnan’s tapestries.
Thornton Dial
Through Dec. 20. David Lewis Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, Manhattan. (212) 966-7990; davidlewisgallery.com.
The great self-taught artist Thornton Dial (1928-2016) made his tough relief-like paintings out of nearly any detritus that came his way, including rope rugs, wire screen and scraps of wood and fabric. His roiling works convey the hardship and creativity of Black life in the South while also responding sardonically to modernist painting’s fixations with all-overness and flatness. There is a certain tension between what Mr. Dial used and how.
In the small show “Dial World Part I: The Tiger that Flew Over New York City,” the title painting (from 1990) depicts a grinning feline flying above a forest of buildings, like one of Chagall’s airborne figures. It’s a visionary image, rendered in black, white and brown, much of whose force stems from being executed on strips of shag carpet.
With only eight paintings, this small, exceptional exhibition reveals some gentler if no less eccentric — or vehement — sides of Mr. Dial’s achievement. “In the Making of Our Oldest Things” (2009), a relatively low-key surface of mostly pieces of bright printed fabric edged with twine, is laid out like a map or a quilt, and brushed with black paint so that it resembles a beautiful but charred world. The pillowy surface of “In Honor” (2002) uses tufted mattress tops spray-painted shades of dark, velvety burgundy to Cubist effect. And in “Patterns: Road Map of the United States” (1992), one of Dial’s menageries of animals — characteristically rubbery and colorful — is silhouetted on stark white, which makes them especially dynamic. It’s rare that a small show feels so transformative.
ROBERTA SMITH
Thomas Eggerer
Through Dec. 19. Petzel, 35 East 67th Street, Manhattan. 212-680-9467; petzel.com.
Thomas Eggerer’s new show, “Corridor,” is centered on an enormous canvas of the same name, an aerial view of a protest just over 10 feet square. Scores of identically dressed men and women drift down a six-lane highway flanked by bike paths and crosswalks. There are a few allusions to real events — pink umbrellas might bring Women’s Marches to mind, figures kneeling could be saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” But the banners they carry are all blank.
The Brooklyn-based German painter made six smaller works, too, most of them glimpses from below of people sitting on scaffolding. Another, “The Massacre,” shows a neatly spaced arrangement of half-eaten hamburgers and glistening ketchup blobs descending like characters in an early Macintosh screen saver.
The larger painting has some of the same clunky screen-saver charm. It’s clear, at first glance, that it’s built from a limited number of elements arranged according to a limited set of rules. So you might suppose it’s a picture of human beings as impotent atoms in a sea of forces beyond their control, even their most passionate demonstrations as formulaic as the weather. You might even consider the buoyant breadth and receding perspective, the white placards popping from across the room, as evidence of how easy it is to fool the eye. But I think they’re evidence that even the simplest building blocks, if you put them together the right way, can make magic.
WILL HEINRICH
Harriet Korman
Through Dec.19. Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Manhattan. (212) 645-8701; thomaserben.com
Those who dedicate their lives to making art usually have early, middle and late phases. This show, modestly subtitled “Notes on Painting, 1969-2019,” follows Harriet Korman through hers with a dozen canvases accounting for 50 years of forward motion that has not been without struggle.
The works start with Ms. Korman’s brilliant, daringly casual Process Art paintings from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Covering parallel lines of blue crayon with white acrylic that she partly scraped off, she created loosely gridded tattersall patterns of line, paint and bare canvas that built on the radical ideas of older painters like Frank Stella and Robert Ryman, and made Ms. Korman briefly something of a young art star.
Then starting in the late ’70s and through the mid ’90s, she regrouped, shifting to oil paint, trying to build on her distinctively casual approach to geometry. Around the turn of this century, she settled into a seemingly conservative geometry of brightly colored shapes and stripes that she gradually made strange and new. Unrelieved by white or any figure-ground push-pull, Ms. Korman’s colors are saturated, even slightly dark and structured into intuitive compositions; they press forward with an unusual emotional and optical intensity.
In an untitled painting from 2001, a field of mostly irregular triangles jostle one another for prominence. In a 2016 painting, also untitled, concentric right angles of many colors push in from the corners, forming a quasi-cross or four asymmetrical chevrons. It would be inspiring to see Ms. Korman’s 50 years of art-making filled out with more examples of her journey. What is here conveys refreshingly different ideas about originality, discipline and self-awareness. Life is short, art is long. Painting, at least measured by the time often required to develop, may be the longest of all.
ROBERTA SMITH
Sheida Soleimani
Through Dec. 23. Denny Dimin Gallery, 39 Lispenard Street, Manhattan. 212-226-6537, dennydimingallery.com.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Sheida Soleimani made the photographs in her exhibition “Hotbed” digitally. Collapsing space and subject matter into densely layered images of body parts, food, electronics and more, they’re informed by a certain internet aesthetic. But Ms. Soleimani’s artworks are analogue, compositions of items arranged in her studio. Their premise, then, is epistemological as much as formal: Much of what we think we know is a distortion or an illusion.
Ms. Soleimani seeks to rectify that by using her practice to deepen viewers’ understanding of Iran, from which her parents escaped in the 1980s as political refugees. The realities of life there, the country’s tense relationship with the West, and the geopolitics of the Middle East are the focus of her work. Her 2018 solo show at CUE Art Foundation denounced the operations of the global oil economy by caricaturing its leaders. “Hotbed” maintains the same critical bite but channels it into still lifes that are more challenging and complex.
The standouts here come from two series. “Crudes” features conceptual “portraits” of crude oil blends, like “Iran Heavy” (2018), which is represented by a fish blowing a gum bubble and leaning against weights. The piece is bizarrely seductive, but also filled with deeper meanings — for example, both the gum and weights are made with petroleum products. “Levers of Power” dissects the pageantry of politics by isolating the arms of American and Iranian politicians. As disembodied limbs point and wipe amid fields of symbolic props, the gestures of the powerful are rendered hollow and absurd.
JILLIAN STEINHAUER
Etel Adnan
Through Dec. 23. Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West 26th Street, Manhattan. 212-315-0470; galerielelong.com.
“When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do?” writes the 95-year-old polymath Etel Adnan in her new book, “Shifting the Silence,” which contemplates death and aging. “Of course, nothing. But that’s no answer.” The book’s publication this fall coincides with her new show, “Seasons.”
Born in Lebanon, Ms. Adnan studied at the Sorbonne, taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael, moved back to Beirut, and now lives in Paris. When art critics focus on her storied biography, we’re trying, I think, to convey something about Ms. Adnan’s output itself: that its simple gestures never read as provincialism. And its willingness to tackle big topics — like nature, mortality and astronomical phenomena — speaks not to naïveté but to the broad-minded interests of a seasoned thinker.
Tapestries depicting semiabstract, foliage-filled landscapes occupy the gallery’s main space, which also features an accordion-folded book with ink-drawn shapes. But the show’s knockout works are its smallest, quietest pieces. All made this year, these paintings each ostensibly depict a planet looming above an object on the ground, whether a bicycle or a ghostly looking shrub created with a palette knife scraping away lime-green paint. The celestial orb in “Planète 17” hovers over an indeterminate shape — a skull, maybe? Ms. Adnan allows the paint of its outlines to bead up rather than form smooth lines, as if evoking sweat or decay in a parched landscape. Each work seems bent on one-upping its neighbor with inventive play. The results are enchanting.
DAWN CHAN
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