R E V I E W S operatic celebration of how things actually keep going even though they don’t appear to be working much of the time. The chains, rollers and powering devices are colossal and ungainly but even with the occasional programmed glitch, the contraptions self-correct. The gallery itself, located in a converted industrial space with an exposed ceiling fitted with tubes, cables and weathered concrete floor, provides the ideal setting for the works of Stephen Neidich.
dress suggest the movement of wind. The largest and central painting of the show is titled An Ocean Away (2020). It was amusing to learn Sherald found her sitters for this scene with a quick search on Instagram, which led her to Lou, a surf instructor for youths at Rockaway Beach. Idyllic sand dunes with beach grass undulate before a cloudless, flat blue sky. The sun creates harsh shadows on the sand, where a man sits on his surfboard, surveying the ocean intently. A boy with a solemn look on his face stands nearby holding a large yellow surfboard. Is the man simply doing his job by keeping an eye on his students, or has something occurred in the ocean? A young couple from Brooklyn seen in As American as apple pie (2020) stand before a classic American car and a proud two-story home with a white picket fence. The man’s khakis, Converse sneakers and jean jacket, paired with the woman’s Barbie T-shirt—all pink attire and gold accessories—offer a more realistic alternative to Mattel’s iconic personifications of Americana, Barbie and Ken. Sherald’s show is like a much needed cold drink of water on a hot day, long overdue and refreshing.
Lucy Bull David Kordansky Gallery By Shana Nys Dambrot
Amy Sherald, An Ocean Away, 2020, ©Amy Sherald, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, photo by Joseph Hyde.
Amy Sherald Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles By Bianca Collins
Painter Amy Sherald became a household name in 2018 when her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art. Sherald’s unique approach to studio portraiture and practice of universally rendering Black skin in grisaille (an underpainting technique in which a painter uses a monochromatic palette in gray), often foregrounded before an opaque color field, distinguished her from her peers, while her mastery of form and precision with line earned her a seat at the table of contemporary blue-chip American artists. Sherald reaffirms that Black people are “The Great American Fact” (the title of this show taken from an 1892 book by educator Anna Julia Cooper) in her first West Coast solo exhibition. Five figurative paintings offer images of the spectacular banal, linking Blackness with the quotidian through Americana icons such as the surfboard, white picket fence and a beach cruiser bicycle, removing Black bodies from the scenes of violence and oppression they too often inhabit. In A Midsummer Afternoon Dream (2020), a serene young woman leans on a bicycle, its basket overflowing with flowers and a fluffy white puppy. The woman’s Grecian contrapposto and the Renaissance-esque fabric draping her body link her to powerful, monumental figures that precede her in the art historical narrative. Crisp blades of perfectly lush green grass add texture to the painting, while subtle shading in the dog’s soft white hair and on our heroine’s
There almost certainly are figures both human and animal, as well as a plenitude of botanical, arboreal, avian and possibly extraterrestrial apparitions inhabiting and defining the landscape-like spaces of Lucy Bull’s paintings. But closer contemplation makes it pretty clear that it has been the mind of the viewer which has placed them there, rather than the hand of the artist. Bull’s palette also lends itself to neuro-optical shenanigans, as its exponential hyper-artificiality collides with an intense experience of florid, fecund nature. Bull depoys a chromatic juggernaut featuring the radiant yellow-green of new spring buds, the sickly rosy-red flush of wounds, cool mint of magic hour breezes, emerald and teal prisms of oil slicks and ostrich feathers, explosive yellow of solar flares and astral smatterings like the pale lavender of wildflowers. This shifting kaleidoscope is further activated by her array of studio techniques, so that the multivalent texture of every centimeter of surface is alive in its own unique gathering of strokes, streaks, pools, drips, smears, daubs, swirls, slashes, dashes and the most exquisite feathering. Looking at these oil paintings on linen, like the majestic Stinger and the courtly Permission (both 2021), the optical effect is
Lucy Bull,The Bottoms, 2021, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane.
