Art in Brief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
VIRGINIE BARRÉ: BAUHAUS
Parker’s Box
The American Indian tribes of the Southwest and the functional modernism of the Bauhaus would seem to have little in common. Yet French artist Virginie Barré weds them with oneiric absurdity in her first New York solo show.
Keeping with a body of work that combines incongruous elements through the logic of dreams, the works on view in Williamsburg fuse images of Sioux, Hopi, and Mosa tribes with signal examples of modernist design.
A series of black-and-white drawings based on a simple and iterative composition placing diminutive representations of American Indians — more cowboy comics than authentic renderings — on pieces of furniture or typographical elements.
In “Hopi Girl and Chair Prototype B5 by Marcel Breuer, 1926,” a female figure stares at the viewer from underneath a tubular steel chair. A group of tiny Crow warriors on horses ride across a classic of 20th-century furniture in “Apsarokes and Barcelona Armchair by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, 1929–1948.” In another drawing, a Sioux woman with a weathered face rests on a letter from Herbert Bayer’s lowercase, sans serif typeface. Ms. Barré keeps such motifs jarringly unbalanced throughout the drawings, precariously pairing ritualized forms with the ahistorical formalism of Bauhaus design.
While the affinity between modern art and the “tribal” is well established, Ms. Barré’s idiosyncratic combination seems to be governed only by the dreamlike allusions she makes in joining disjunctive imagery. What’s made clear in this facile connection is the huge cultural rift that separates the two — one now a universalized formal language, the other a victim of stereotyping, violence, and misappropriation.
In contrast, her five uncannily realistic sculptured works fare better in their effect, by reference to the spiritual dimensions of modernist design. Female figures are swaddled in military blankets adorned with geometric patterns culled from nonobjectivist painting. The handcrafted geometric designs of traditional crafts are reflected in the plastic elements and visual language taken from modernist painting — serving almost as talismans in Ms. Barré’s ritual setting.
Until January 14 (193 Grand St., Brooklyn, 718-388-2882).
