An ‘Old Master,’ Defiantly at Work
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At 66, and still basking in last year’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Elizabeth Murray is surely one of the old masters of the contemporary scene. But her recent work doesn’t have any of the characteristics of seniority.
The 18 pieces on display at PaceWildenstein, dating between 2003 and 2006, include 10 of her trademark painted constructions in which oil on canvas is stretched on sculpturally shaped wooden supports.These images have as much youthful, boisterous spunk as anything she has produced in an already visually raucous career.
“Old age” style has usually to do with looseness, both in terms of medium application and the definition of forms. But these works stand out within her oeuvre thanks to sharp focus, crisp chroma, and clarity of line.
The artist has openly battled cancer for some time, which only makes the virile humor and graphic punch of her compositions more striking. “The Sun and the Moon” (2005), one of the pieces in the MoMA show, can be called an orderly depiction of chaos. The pink skeletal figure recalls something out of the Mexican Day of the Dead, but like everything else in this cartoon-inspired carnival, it exudes a defiant spirit of affirmation.
Another work from MoMA’s exhibition given a second outing here is “Do the Dance” (2005), now in that museum’s collection.That it recalls the board game “Chutes and Ladders” is an apt metaphor for a sensibility that bounces recklessly from high to low. While the jumble of red sticks at the top center recalls Russian Constructivism, the contour lines and linear accents put us in mind of the late Keith Haring (the similarity is more overt in “The New World” from 2006). The eye takes a wild journey through Ms. Murray’s work, liable at any moment to be whisked off towards exhilaration or shoved unceremoniously into absurdity.
Ms. Murray fuses ribald humor and linguistic experiment in a way that itself constitutes a high-low collision. In whichever state, there is no question that she is a vulgarian, in the accurate, not the pejorative, sense of the term. Her ability to play abstraction and figuration simultaneously, and to deal with life’s impurities and the higher realms of “pure” shape and color, recalls many classic forebears within the modernist canon — Picasso or Miró, for instance. (That makes her a natural for MoMA, a living exemplar of modernism.) That these two artistic forebears hail from the same country might not be a coincidence: Ms. Murray was born in Chicago, and although she has made her career in New York, a goofy, Rabelasian life inclusiveness of Chicago art, across several generations, is an equivalent to Spain’s mix of the earthy and the metaphysical.
Another of the dichotomies alive within Ms. Murray’s art is that between depth and flatness.The latter is served by her penchant for isolated instances of solid color, and for graphic devices that, although depicting volume and depth, are nonetheless obviously from the language of cartoons and illustration. The cutout shapes on which she works stand away from the wall, emphasizing the artificiality of the support and further defeating illusions of depth. But then, color and shape are still able to work their trompe l’oeil magic. In “Baby Snakes” (2006), with its knowing disparities of scale and its sensations of protrusion and recession, artfully compressed grids lead the eye around corners and into distances.And her painterly touch, for all its newfound Stuart Davis–like precisionism, still has a lushness that slows down the gaze, militating against the work’s graphic immediacy. Shifting speed might be the wildest game Ms. Murray plays.
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Tom Burckhardt, who is having his third solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, taps a similar mix of art and life, the earthy and ethereal, abstraction and illustration, earnestness and horsing around.
Typical of this artist, there is both thematic and formal unity to his show of ink drawings on paper. The leitmotifs are a collaged cutout photograph of the artist and stretched, bare canvases. There isn’t the belligerently disparate scale and jarringly different touch that have characterized previous work.These images are strongly reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints — not the classics of the Ukiyo-e period so much as 20th-century descendants of that tradition. Depicting the artist and his canvases coping with crises — whether ecological, domestic, or existential — the scenes exude dark humor.
In “Vortex” (all 2006), a churning sea sucks canvases in a spiral toward its center, the artist feeding the maelstrom with more and more of them. In “Icarus Launch,” the artist flies off a cliff with canvases as wings, faring rather well. In other images, he fends off freezing winds with a bonfire of canvases, or survives a shipwreck with a raft and sail made of them.
With their intentional deadpan, these ironic images can recall the illustrator Glen Baxter and his hapless cowboys. But Mr. Burckardt transcends the cartoon idiom to achieve an odd, personal balance of the silly and the poignant. “Conflagration,” a huge work that is 80 inches by 144 inches, melds together illustration and decoration with rare élan. A huge circle of canvases in a barren landscape is doused by the artist, creating a fireball which, in the heavens, turns into an exquisite patchwork of Al Held and Stephen Mueller-like abstract swirls and shapes. That an iconoclastic act, rendered with nerdish realism, results in this apotheosis of abstraction comes across as an allegory of style. If the artist himself believes it, his next show will have less irony and more abstraction.
Murray until November 11 (534 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-7000);
Burckhardt until November 11 (724 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-262-5050).