77ART IN AMERICAEXHIBITION REVIEWS

Four 2010 drawings, each Untitled (After Knox Martin), portray a crowded scene composed of swans, a recumbent nude, a trumpet, a ram, and, on the periphery, a petite, pony-tailed figure gazing at an image of a skull in her hands—perhaps her sketched interpretation of the scene before her, or, even, a mirror. Each of the four drawings shifts slightly the extent of what is framed, as if Brown held a viewfinder up to the original painting (Knox Martin’s Concert in the Park, 1955), cropping differently each time. This shifting perspective suggests the import that active looking holds for Brown’s practice. As she explained in an interview, “Learning to draw is teaching yourself how to see, or making some-thing you want to see.” Her drawings open onto a formal dreamland, willed into existence through repetition.

—Elizabeth Buhe

ZAO WOU-KIAsia SocietyON VIEW THROUGH JAN. 8Chinese-born painter Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) had a long and successful career. But his story presents a classic example of an artist who established an international reputation early on but over time came to be taken for granted, if not nearly forgotten. However, in the wake of the wave of Chinese artists (such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Zhang Huan, and Ai Weiwei) who came to prominence in the West in the 1990s, Zao’s merging of Eastern and Western elements in his painting now seems prescient; and in recent years his reputation has been dramatically elevated by critics, curators, artists, and art historians.

NEW YORKCECILY BROWNDrawing CenterThe title of Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Drawing Center, “Rehearsal,” was intended to reflect the meaning of the Old French version of the term. Rehercier, a wall text instructed, meant “to go over something again with the aim of more fully understanding it,” rather than, as “rehearse” currently denotes, to practice for a crowning performance. Featuring seventy-eight works on paper from 1997 to last year, the exhibition—the artist’s first solo museum show in New York and her first presentation dedicated exclusively to drawing—argued for Brown’s sketches as a unique site of formal investigation that should be considered sepa-rately from the expressive, visceral, oil-loaded paintings for which she is best known. Though the drawings sometimes approach the large scale of her canvases, they are not prepa-ratory studies, making this independent showing apposite.

Hung on bubblegum-pink walls, the drawings were grouped in sets of three to eleven according to their shared source imagery. Brown is up-front about her art historical references in these works—Degas’s Young Spar-tans, plates from Goya’s “Disasters of War”—so identify-ing the original sources is not the game. Nor is the point to ascribe the critical logic standard to appropriation art: Brown is not parodying these forms. The sketches bear witness to her process of making copied form her own through repetition. In two watercolors—each Untitled (Bestiary), 2011—from a series based on the cover image from a book of nineteenth-century engravings, the upper contour of a baboon’s arm seamlessly doubles as the smooth ridge of the adjacent rhinoceros’s back. One of the various works titled Strolling Actresses (After Hogarth), meanwhile, gainfully exploits the older artist ’s serpentine line through a number of details, including the articula-tion of a bald eagle sprouting straight from a squatting man’s head. The fluidity in Brown’s drawings might result from her working process; according to the exhibition catalogue, she follows her sources without stepping back to evaluate what she is making. Her facility with line is clear: she puts marks down quickly and confidently.

Motifs recur not only within sets of drawings but also across them. In a 2013 watercolor rendered in variously diluted burnt sienna tones—one of the multiple images designated Untitled (After Jeux de dames cruelles)—the main event is undeniably an impending spanking located dead center, with one figure’s arm raised above another’s bare ass. Yet despite the scene’s apparent interiority, a feathered creature with a V-shaped brow and hooklike beak, imported from another series, perches at the composition’s margin. Its presence suggests Brown’s flattening of her catholic referents into an ever-available present, a historically coded yet highly subjective personal vocabulary. Everywhere, narrative is infused with energy, sometimes sexual, almost always primal, from acts of penetration to pairings of wild beasts.

Cecily Brown: Untitled (After Jeux de dames cruelles), 2013, watercolor and gouache on paper, 16¼ by 12½ inches; at the Drawing Center.

78 JANUARY 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

on view were painted in the 1970s and after. The large canvas 13.01.76, titled for its date of completion, offers a vibrant composition in which passages of turquoise brushstrokes on either side emerge from a field of yellow—the painting conjuring the promise of spring on the coldest of winter days. A particularly radiant example from his last years, 22.11.2002–10.12.2003, shows what appears to be a majestic mountain, rendered in furtive brushstrokes of golden brown, faintly visible through a pale blue haze. Characteristic of Zao’s mystical vision, these works reflect his personal reverence for traditional Chinese art as well as his lifelong commitment to the universal language of abstract painting.

—David Ebony

KARIN SCHNEIDERDominique LévyFor her first exhibition at Dominique Lévy, “Situational Diagram,” Karin Schneider filled both floors of the gal-lery’s Upper East Side town house with variations on the theme of the black monochrome. For these works (all 2016), Schneider employed a set of specific processes—splitting, cancelling, obstructing, monochroming, extracting, and naming—that conjoined historical forms of abstraction to structuralist theories of power and subjectivity, as elaborated in an eighteen-page exhibition guide containing dense exegeses by the artist on each category. Here, Schneider inverted the conventional relationship between the artwork and its explanatory supplements: the works were not self-sufficient aesthetic objects but rather pointed the viewer to the concepts described in the texts. As a result, the exhibi-tion functioned less like an installation of discrete works than like a system comprising interrelated parts.

An installation of sixteen paintings titled “Obstruc-tion(als)” dominated the gallery’s first floor. These black-on-black canvases inspired by the work of Ad Reinhardt

“No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” features around fifty of the artist’s major paintings and drawings, plus a selection of prints. The show (which debuted at the Asia Society and opens next month at its co-organizing institution, the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine) focuses on the 1950s paintings that established his career, although there are several representative examples from more recent decades.

Born in Beijing and raised in Shanghai and Hangzhou, Zao relocated to Paris in 1948, just before the Chinese Revolution. His appreciation for Western modernist painting was apparent in his work from the outset. Among the earliest pieces on view, Untitled (Tennis Players) and Landscape in Hangzhou (both 1946) are wispy outdoor scenes painted in a manner that recalls traditional Chinese landscape painting but also incorporates elements of Post-Impressionism, especially Cézanne’s painting. The influence of Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee is strongly felt in the work Zao made after he moved to Paris, where he saw paintings by these artists in museums and galleries. Untitled (Teapot and Vase with Twigs), 1951, a fine example from his early Paris years, is a luminous, Redon-like still life in which dark silhouettes of a teapot and a vase of flowering branches hover in a misty field of pale blue and reddish brushstrokes.

Zao hit his stride in the mid-1950s with paintings featuring flourishes of calligraphic markings—illegible forms based on archaic Chinese writing—set against hazy, near-monochrome backgrounds suggestive of deep, medita-tive space. Red Pavilion (1954), a medium-size canvas, shows exuberant passages of dark, calligraphic brushstrokes set against a fiery red ground. The work’s title refers to the classic 1791 novel by Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Cham-ber, which traces the fall of an aristocratic family. In Red Pavilion, Zao uses a fundamentally abstract visual vocabu-lary to address the cultural transformation of his homeland following the 1949 revolution.

Zao continued to develop his rarefied form of lyrical abstraction in the subsequent decades, most often inspired by nature. Some of the most unabashedly gorgeous works

Zao Wou-Ki: 13.01.76, 1976, oil on canvas, 59 by 63¾ inches; at the Asia Society.

View of Karin Schneider’s exhibition “Situational Diagram,” 2016, showing her “Obstruction(als),” 2016, at Dominique Lévy.

Copyright of Art in America is the property of Art in America, LLC and its content may notbe copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles forindividual use.