14 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
ARTHUR DOVE, “WILLOWS,” 1940 © THE ESTATE OF ARTHUR G. DOVE/COURTESY TERRY DINTENFASS, INC.
Prunella Clough (1919-99), a superbly weird British modernist who
deserves to be better known, was fond of a quote by Édouard Manet:
“Painting is like throwing oneself into the sea to learn to swim.”
Looking at art can be like that, too—a crash course and a full-body
experience. Visitors to the new MOMA can take that kind of plunge
(through Apr. 20) in “The Shape of Shape,” a big show in a small space
filled with seventy-one paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings,
and prints from the museum’s collection, all chosen by the voraciously
smart Amy Sillman, a superbly weird painter herself. (She contributes
an uncredited, blood-red wall work, equal parts shadow and viscera.)
She chose the catchall concept of shape because it’s off the grid—less
theorized than, say, color or systems. The installation proceeds in an
obstreperous progression of four rows on three walls and covers more
than a century, from 1890 to 2017, but eschews chronology in favor
of dream logic and gut instinct. Marquee names (Calder, Duchamp,
Matisse, Rodin), artist’s artists (Forrest Bess, Prunella Clough, Arthur
Dove, Christina Ramberg), and the frankly obscure (the Croatian
sculptor Ivan Kožarić) all become firsts among equals.—Andrea K. ScottINTHEMUSEUMS
spelled out in scratchily handwritten cap-
tions, which float in gray skies above horrific
scenes. Judging from “Bob Loves Sally Until
She Is Blue in the Face,” from 2000, and
“Billy (and His Friends) Did Find Sally in
the Tree,” made this year, poor Sally has been
murdered twice in two decades. Childlike,
Expressionist figuration leaves the details
somewhat vague, but scabby areas of pig-
ment and collaged elements speak volumes.
Lynch’s clean-lined lamp sculptures are foils
to his lurid canvases; the graceful works in
the “Douglas Fir Top Lamp” series, from
2002, resemble illuminated birdhouses on
stilts. But two lovely new “lamps” combine
the encrusted and austere aspects of his sen-
sibility: in each, lumpy, hand-formed red
and yellow shapes join steel armatures and
a single blue chandelier bulb to form ob-
jects of a quintessentially Lynchian hybrid
of strangeness and precision.—J.F. (Through
Dec. 15.)Richard Serra
Gagosian
CHELSEA Great sculptors are rare and strange.
In Western art, whole eras have gone by
without one. Their effects partake in a
variant of the sublime that I experience as,
roughly, beauty combined with something
unpleasant. Richard Serra, with current
shows at three branches of the Gagosian
gallery, is our great sculptor, like it or not.
I say relax and like it. On West Twenty-first
Street, a nearly hundred-foot-long elon-
gated S shape of two-inch-thick weather-
proof steel is sealed by a patina of softly
textured rust. On West Twenty-fourth,
standing steel cylinders, weighing fifty
tons apiece, differ in proportion of height
to breadth. On Madison Avenue, there are
“drawings,” rather a frail word for diptychs
and triptychs of large sheets of heavy paper
bearing thick black shapes in paint stick,
ink, and silica—hardly pictorial, they are
about as amiable as the front ends of oncom-
ing trucks. There’s something profoundly
satisfying—gravity as gravitas—about keep-
ing company with all these new Serras, as
of being entrusted with a home truth of
your and, for that matter, anything’s earthly
existence. The sensation might be a tuning
fork to gauge the degree of fact in other as-
pects of a world awash in pixelated illusions.
How real is real? How real are we?—Peter
Schjeldahl (Through Feb. 1.)“The Pencil Is a Key”
The Drawing Center
DOWNTOWN When Welmon Sharlhorne put
ballpoint pen to manila file folder to make his
clockwork-like drawing “The Eight Ball Com-
pany,” around 1996, he was forty-four years
old and had spent half his life in Louisiana’s
notorious Angola prison. (He served twen-
ty-two years on a single count of extortion.)
The guards refused to give him art-making
materials, so he requested office supplies, to
correspond with a nonexistent lawyer. “When
you are doing time, you have the time to re-
alize how art can keep you free,” Sharlhorne,
who now lives in New Orleans, has said. That
freedom is the subject of this revelatory show
of some hundred and forty pieces by incar-bursts of color. Among the surreal outliers
are “The Distance Involved,” portraying an
eerily animate candelabra, and “Mr. Pea-
nut,” in which the top-hatted legume feeds
a strawberry to a buxom nude, who is clearly
playacting her pleasure.—Johanna Fateman
(Through Nov. 22.)
Baseera Khan
Subal
DOWNTOWN In this show, titled “snake skin,”
the New York-based artist has wrapped a
column in cut-up custom Kashmiri silk rugs
and sliced it into seven pieces that suggest
sunbursts, the cogs of otherworldly wheels,
or the cross-sections of a massive tree. (The
“snake” is the column, the textiles are the
“skin,” and Khan thinks of their weavers
as her collaborators.) Some of the sections
are stacked, to display the patchwork of
the woven designs (and also chunks of the
column’s core of turquoise foam). Others
rest on the floor, showing off stratified sur-
faces that are pink with fiery resin-dyed
centers. The intricate textile exteriors have
become something like contraband since the
Indian government’s crackdown on Kash-
mir; elements of them also appear in the
artist’s wonderful framed collages. These
layered works, featuring images of ruins,
vintage covers of the East German magazine
Mosaik, and a text by Arundhati Roy, are a
vibrant sidebar to Khan’s modular, ornate,
and wholly impressive centerpiece.— J. F.
(Through Dec. 22.)David Lynch
Sperone Westwater
DOWNTOWN In this polymath filmmaker’s
paintings, macabre micro-narratives are