Sometimes, the world catches up to an artist. Kathe Burkhart has been making a spectacle of Elizabeth Taylor since the nineteen-eighties—in big, brash mixed-media paintings loosely based on movie stills. (The American artist considers the pictures self-portraits, a seed planted when Burkhart’s mother told her she had a “child’s mind in a woman’s body,” a line that Taylor had coined to describe herself.) But the series has never looked more of the moment than it does now: a chorus of eight nasty women assembled a block from Trump Tower. Underscoring the pictures’ pop-punk tone of rude-girl defiance is the series of phrases, most of them expletives, emblazoned across the canvases like closed captions for the outrage-impaired. Still, as powerful as Burkhart’s feminist politics are, they’re not the main draw here. That would be the tautly extravagant compositions, which play the essential flatness of acrylic paint against collaged elements, in a campy palette of gold, crimson, and teal—and, of course, Liz Taylor-eye violet.
Through Feb. 24th. (Boone, 745 Fifth Ave., 212-752-2929.)
Sometimes, an artist catches up to herself. When I walked into Sally Ross’s opening at Fergus McCaffrey last week, I was sure that I had the wrong show: these ambitious, muscular abstractions bore zero resemblance to the quirky neo-surrealist still-lifes that the New York painter was making a decade ago. There’s an old-fashioned word for what happened in Ross’s studio: a breakthrough. And, in a sense, these are old-fashioned paintings, disinterested in life lived onscreen. They’re about taking apart the engine of abstraction and reassembling it, to see if it can go any faster. Ross has reified that idea by making paintings and then cutting them up, suturing the elements back together into rough-hewn mosaics with visible stitches, as if to remind us that paintings are bodies in space. Ross makes unabashed reference to some big-league heroes: Jasper Johns, Sigmar Polke, Lee Bontecou. With this show, the fifty-two-year-old artist joins the majors herself.
Through February 24th. (McCaffrey, 514 W. 26th St., 212-988-2200.)
These are just two of the passel of painting shows that have opened in the city in 2018. Some others that merit attention: the New Jersey-born phenom Jamian Juliano-Villani, at JTT, who has never sourced a weird image she couldn’t make weirder; the septuagenarian realist Catherine Murphy, at Peter Freeman, in whose hands back-yard banalities offer glimpses of the sublime; and the mid-career German Ellen Gronemeyer, at Anton Kern, whose work put a storm-cloud spin on Paul Cézanne’s quote “We live in a rainbow of chaos.” Below are three more painting reviews, hot off the presses, from the January 29th issue of the magazine.—Andrea K. Scott
The subject of the Dutch painter’s new show is greenhouses, but her imagery evokes haunted houses as well. Strict gray lines delineate transparent architecture with illusionistic precision. The tropical plants—a dashed-off bromeliad, a lushly rendered fern—serve as a reminder that paint is itself a kind of haunting. Klein has long worked from photographs, incorporating accidents of the darkroom into her elegant paintings. You may find yourself asking if the ectoplasmic irregularities here originated with smudges on negatives or with the dirty glass walls that they document. But such questions don’t break the spell of these entrancing scenes, in which a coiled heating unit assumes the otherworldly aspect of a flying saucer.
Through Feb. 15. (Bonakdar, 521 W. 21st St., 212-414-4144.)
Slices of watermelon, Nike swooshes, bug-eyed Garfields, rolls of toilet paper, and Coke bottles, outlined in spray paint and filled in with drippy areas of color—no one could accuse this talented painter of holding back. Bernhardt renders her boisterous images with pictographic consistency and appealingly messy abandon. “Laundry Day” is the monochromatic outlier: it shows a Day-Glo Pink Panther, with tube socks floating around him, disappearing into a background of muddied fuchsia. As funny, and even festive, as the paintings are, look with care and you’ll notice their critical streak. In “Dole + Darth Vader,” bananas hover around the Stars Wars villain—part Storm Trooper commander, part Carmen Miranda. Through Feb. 11. (Canada, 333 Broome St., 212-925-4631.)
A supernaturally bright cadmium orange dominates the portraits in the twenty-eight-year-old painter’s show, titled “Revisiting the Area.” The area is the neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where Niles grew up. In his dreamy compositions, he exalts his subjects with hair styles and beards dense with glitter, while populating their surroundings with spectral figures and menacing creatures. In “A Safe Place Since Birth (Sisters),” two middle-aged women—one appears serious, the other beatific—stand in front of a brick wall. At their feet, a ghoulish baby wields a shiv—the predominant mood is a far cry from safe. A similar demon attends the five young men portrayed hanging out on the stoop of a housing complex in “Where We Played as Kids.” That figure and the fiery palette lend a jittery edge to a scene that might have otherwise felt nostalgic. Through Feb. 25. (Uffner, 170 Suffolk St., 212-274-0064.)
