Latter-Day Surrealists on the Comeback Trail

The 1980s were a heyday for secondhand Surrealism. As postmodern artists sought extreme measures by which to liberate themselves from the tight, politically correct, po-faced, conceptual-minimal avant-garde that preceded them, many looked back at Surrealism through the prism of 1960s Pop art. Brash, shameless commercialism was all the rage; sexual exuberance, melodramatic narrative, gaudy color, historic eclecticism, and all the posturing antics of deliberately “bad” painting came to the fore.Three stars from that now-distant galaxy – Ashley Bickerton, George Condo, and Mark Kostabi – are currently enjoying comebacks. A passing of years, however, is no synonym for maturity: All three retain their puerile iconoclasm. And none of them ever really disappeared in the first place. Mr. Kostabi, for instance, has had 160 solo exhibitions, including 29 in New York City, in a career dating back to 1981.Mr. Bickerton is the subject of a two-part exhibition at Sonnabend, his longtime dealer, and Lehmann Maupin. These unite the quirky, faux hi-tech packaging contraptions for which he was best known in the late 1980s with his recent forays into hyperrealist paintings and collages. Different though these early and recent bodies of work are in terms of genre and technique, they are united in their predilection for chilly shock.In the 1980s, Mr. Bickerton’s sardonic commentary on value systems allied him with fellow “neo-geo” artists Peter Halley and Jeff Koons. These early constructions, which he labeled “self-portraits” – they have also been titled “Commercial pieces” and “Anthropospheres” – also look like forebears of Matthew Barney and Adrea Zittel in the way they collide technological iconographies and obsessive design.“Commercial Piece #2” (1989) at Lehmann Maupin, in anodized aluminum, wood, acrylic, and rubber, is a meticulously fabricated, wackily conceived container of indefinable function. A blue crate emblazoned with logos, technical instructions, and codes – some appropriated from the mass media, others invented – sports a plethora of James Bond-like straps, bolts, and handles, as if it held a precious or volatile cargo kitted out for a perilous journey.Mr. Bickerton’s recent work, made since he relocated to Bali, has turned toward figurative painting. There is an extensive series of “Green Reflecting Heads” (2006), ghoulish creatures that resemble Shrek’s less cuddly cousins, floating like decoys in a toxic-looking swamp. “Hula Girls” (2006) places collages of raunchy, oiled-up, and besmirched Asian women in a honeycomb of cave-like spaces redolent of Magritte.“The Patron” (1997) over at Sonnabend offers a jaundiced view of art’s end users (although, as the picture used to belong to Charles Saatchi and is now for sale, that might be an inaccurate term for collectors.) It depicts a gross, pallid, hirsute middle-aged man on a George Nelson Marshmallow chair. Almost naked, he has one hand in his shorts while the other fingers a television remote. He is surrounded by such trophies as a Brancusi and a Mondrian, while the shaved coat of his pet Chinese Crested echoes the icky exposedness of the owner.Mr. Bickerton returns to the theme of unappetizing, middle-age gents living it up in “The Expats” (2004). Two sun-pinked, beer-sodden retirees in an exotic harbor bar, flanked by luscious local escorts, converse over a table of empties. A louche mural of cavorting young sailors is behind them. The connection between such an image and Mr. Bickerton’s “commercial pieces” of the 1980s isn’t obvious, but it could have to do with the collision of squalor and luxury. If so, then the lurid photorealism of Mr. Bickerton’s technique finds a conceptual justification in its alienating finesse.***Perhaps George Condo will one day hang next to Mr. Bickerton in the Bad Painting Hall of Fame. His male character studies and female nudes exude similar depths of misanthropy and misogyny. But where Mr. Bickerton goes for a Northern, sealed-in smoothness, Mr. Condo prefers a more indulgent, Italianate brushiness.A forerunner of John Currin, Mr. Condo adds cruel caricature to a knowingly kitsch, paint-by-the-numbers, Old Masterly look. He also pays tribute to Picasso’s Surrealist phase of the 1920s and ’30s: His figures sprout extra limbs, their facial features displaced by a cutting use of cubist repetition and fracturing. But rather than actually working as disruptive devices, these schlocky, Picassoid elements are merely signifiers of their own appropriation.In his “Existential Portraits,” as he calls these latest works, Mr. Condo has created a balding, grimacing, bow-tied character he names Jean Louis, offered in variant absurdist portraits along with family and staff members. Jean Louis boasts puffed-out jowls, a pug nose, double chins, and popping eyes. The paintings are generally 5 feet high, the figure placed full-on or in profile against a neutral, solid ground.Despite Mr. Condo’s confident brush and the odd nod towards Philip Guston or Francis Bacon, his works belong to the category of anti-painting, pleased as punch with their iconoclasm. Ultimately, they are as free from the pleasures of painterly invention as his nudes are from the possibility of orgasm – the copulating “Couple on a Blue Striped Chair”(2005),for instance, grins as if for a camera.***Mr. Kostabi’s “Suicide by Modernism” (2005) shares a Mondrian with Mr. Bickerton’s “The Patron” and offers no less grim an account of the maker than Mr. Bickerton does of the collector. A painter has given up the ghost, with brush in hand, hanging himself from a Calder mobile that also balances a Campbell’s soup can, a Jasper Johns flag, and a Picasso sculpture.Mr. Kostabi is a 1980s version of the Pop Surrealist. Kostabi World, his enterprise, is a latter-day version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, taking the master’s cynicism to a new level – and dispensing with his charm. A hugely prolific artist, Mr. Kostabi employs a team of painters to execute his work in its generic, deadpan, cartoon-like style. His pictures are often painted in grisaille; when there is color, its flatness makes it look printed rather than applied by hand. Actual works look like computer generated reproductions.His images are populated by egghead robots, their tight clothing seamless with their limbs. Their interactions with technology and the city recall Leger, Schlemmer, William Roberts, or de Chirico. There is a faint Surrealist quality to the strange goings-on, though usually without a Surrealist punch line.In “Everything You Learn You Burn” (2005), there is a receding row of students at desks with books or computers; a book in the front row emits flames. “Irony” (2005) has a woman at an ironing board and a figure in a magician’s hat who miraculously clutches his briefcase, even as his cartoon-like flattened legs and upper body droop over the ends of the board.In a further negation of any sense of originality, Mr. Kostabi hosts “Name That Painting,” a game show where invited critics compete for $20 a piece to name new Kostabis. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit to having competed on occasion. The jury doesn’t favor titles that joke at the expense of the images, which makes it a challenge to keep face and not go home empty-handed.Bickerton until May 27 (Lehmann-Maupin: 540 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-2923; Sonnabend: 536 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-627-1018). Condo until June 3 (531 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9100). Kostabi until June 10 (74 E. 79th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-861-7338).

Latter-Day Surrealists on the Comeback Trail

Latter-Day Surrealists on the Comeback Trail

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