There is a series of portraits of the late, legendary New York gallerists Pat Hearn and Colin de Land by Nina Childress, from 2023. Pat fur is larger than life (210×150 cm), and Hearn looks straight at us with open, expectant eyes; her lips red, her nose a bit, too. She wears pearl earrings, and a huge fur hat that glows from behind in glaring yellow, off-colored like in an old Polaroid. Childress evokes a bygone era, the New York art scene of the 1980s and 90s (Hearn died in 2000 at the age of 45, of cancer, as did de Land at 48, in 2003). Colin Cigarette (night view) celebrates de Land in three-quarter profile, with a cigarette stump dangling from his lips, tousled head of hair, furrowed eyebrows, long moody eyelashes. The picture is phosphorescent green and glows in the dark.
\n But just as you thought Childress presented the two like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonny & Clyde, another set of smaller canvases adds a pinch of cheesy absurdity. The eyes are a bit too big and the shoulders and torso a bit too small in Colin de Land facing\/Pat Hearn facing, adding a Barbie-and-Ken-ness to the romantic, glamorizing drift. A landscape format shows Hearn standing in a corporate
\ngallery space with extravagant, pink and black Cleopatra eye makeup. The title is \u201dNow the market is better and we outgrew the funkiness\u201d: a quote by Hearn from a 1998 artforum interview, regarding the future of the Gramercy art fair \u2013 later renamed Armory Show \u2013 she had co-founded with de Land and others. The paintings were conceived for a presentation at The Art Show, an annual art fair at the Armory. A
\nsatirical and bitter note comes into play: even the legendary Hearn was not immune against the awkwardness of market conformity.
\n Executed with painterly grace and a great range of variation, going from hyper-realism straight to cartoonish abstraction and back, Nina Childress creates portrait epiphanies evoking romanticism and glamor. They are undergirded though by a sense of the ridiculous and the tacky, never staying silent about the self-contradictions and the awkward social realities. Childress \u2013 born in 1961 in Pasadena, California, but having lived most of her life in France \u2013 knew Hearn back from the 1980s. Portrait of Pat Hearn and Chichi \u2013 Chichi, her doggy \u2013 from 1985 is painted in brisk Punk\/New Wave cartoon style. The earliest work in Childress\u2019s catalogue raisonn\u00e9 goes back to 1980; often signed with her punk-singer name Nina Kuss, these early-eighties works quickly took on a satirical twist, whether it was an achingly anemic portrait of Prince Charles and Lady Diana (She wants a double bed, 1981), or a hilariously candy-colored panopticon of the TV characters from Dallas (1982). Soon the work took a turn towards the \u201cneo-primitivist\u201d cartoon style that was prevalent during the early to mid-80s, with artists such as Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf from New York, or Milan Kunc from Dusseldorf.
\n This style could have become a dead-end for Childress, but with her breakthrough 1987 Portrait de Sylvie Vartan, she took a different turn: based on a glamor shot of the Y\u00e9-Y\u00e9-singer from the 1970s, with flirtatious hydrogen-blonde forelock and a necklace of predatory teeth, in the painting her eyes are slightly askew, while the background is dominated by a psychedelic pattern of concentric double rings, equally askew, in sharply contrasting blue, red and yellow. In Childress\u2019s paintings, women are not simply hyper-fetishized objects \u2013 as, later, in
\nworks by Richard Phillips \u2013 but they much more often are subjects controlling the gaze.
\n Childress continued to experiment with subject matters, and painterly techniques (to the extent that she has also ventured into sculpture). And she has addressed the question of object fetishization head-on, with hilarious effect. Whether incessantly painting Tupperware (1990), gummy sweets (1991\/2), soap bars (1992\/3), or more recently, glam metal rock stars (2022), Childress does not accept any motif as too banal, too unworthy of depiction. In that, she is close in spirit to the likes of the late Francis Picabia (with his adaptions of corny image material), Bernard Buffet (his \u201cbad taste\u201d romantic miserabilism) the Belgian line of artists following from Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s P\u00e9riod vache, or the Germans that, in the 1980s and 90s, built on Sigmar Polke\u2019s wacky pop (namely Martin Kippenberger, Werner B\u00fcttner, Albert Oehlen). But also, not to forget, the American sensibility for the grotesquely comical as in George Condo, or the weird and the hobbyist, maybe best expressed in Jim Shaw\u2019s Thrift Store Paintings. What all of these positions have in common is a rebellion against having \u201coutgrown the funkiness\u201c, allowing painting to be probing and experimental again without being stopped by professed seriousness and the dogmatic boundaries of taste (in the large-scale group exhibition \u201cRidiculously Yours!\u201d of 2022\/23, featuring the work of Childress, Cristina Ricupero and me as co-curators have described this particular artistic sensibility as \u201centhusiastic awkwardness\u201d).
\n In Childress\u2019s case, the humor comes with feminist punchlines, maybe most hilariously manifested in her 2018 faithful copy of a self-portrait by the painter Alphonse Faur\u00e9, who depicted himself in unintentional comedy with a black b\u00e9ret, grey painter\u2019s smock, red bow tie and a meaningful gaze wandering into the endless distance. It is what makes Childress\u2019s grandiose oeuvre so outstanding: for more than four decades, she has never lost the desire to test the boundaries of awkwardness and embarrassment, and never lost the desire to experiment, all for the sake of laughter, and art.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a series of portraits of the late, legendary New York gallerists Pat Hearn and Colin de Land by Nina Childress, from 2023. Pat fur is larger than life (210×150 cm), and Hearn looks straight at us with open, expectant eyes; her lips red, her nose a bit, too. She wears pearl… +<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n