THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 5© MAMMA ANDERSSON / ARS, NEW YORK / BILDUPPHOVSRÄTT, SWEDEN / COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER
The equestrians riding into the angsty, orange sky in “Holiday” (pictured),
by the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson, share the same DNA as
Edvard Munch’s screamer and the Romantic loners of Caspar David Frie-
drich, but if they had a soundtrack it might be “In My Room,” by Brian
Wilson. Most of the fourteen poetic pictures in Andersson’s show “The
Lost Paradise,” at the Zwirner gallery (online at davidzwirner.com), are
landscapes, at once specifically Nordic and timelessly placeless. But they
feel interior, too—the rewards of an artist battling uncertainty alone in
her studio, inventing a world. Especially striking are the portraits of trees,
whose bark springs to life through Andersson’s use of a new technique:
oil stick, rubbed into the painted surfaces, leaves a trace so nubby that
you can practically feel it, even onscreen. Andersson is married to the
artist Jockum Nordström, a fellow-Swede who also exhibits at Zwirner;
listen to the couple discuss the pleasures and the struggles of shared
isolation on a new episode of “Dialogues,” the gallery’s terrific podcast
series on the creative process, now in its third season.—Andrea K. ScottA RTONLINE
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ARTRomare Bearden
From 1958 to 1962, this revered Afri-
can-American painter put his vibrant rep-
resentations of black culture and community
on hold in order to experiment with geo-
metric and geological surfaces. Among the
magnetic highlights of the DC Moore gal-
lery’s online selection of these abstractions
are “River Mist,” made from torn pieces of
canvas as variegated as slabs of labradorite
and punctuated with flashes of orange, and
“With Blue,” in which a glacial shape of
pale, drippy pigment rests on a saturated
azure background. There are also examples
of Bearden’s later work, made after he re-
turned, energized by the civil-rights move-
ment, to his previous subject matter. The
mixed-media painting “Feast,” from 1969, is
a lyrically deconstructed Last Supper that
incorporates photographs of African masks;
its striated structure resembles weathered
bands of sediment. The piece indicates
that the artist’s abstract period was not a de-
tour but a bridge to a new era of improvisa-
tion.—Johanna Fateman (dcmooregallery.com)Jutta Koether
For her first show at the Lévy Gorvy gallery,
now online only, this influential German
painter, who splits her time between New
York and Berlin, paired new work with deep
cuts from the nineteen-eighties and nineties.
The result is an abbreviated survey of sorts,
full of art-historical echoes (from Max Ernst
to Florine Stettheimer) and punk insouci-
ance (YouTube has many videos of Koether’s
frequent collaborations with Kim Gordon).
Neo-expressionist bluster is tempered with
sardonic femininity—unfurling ribbons are
a recurring motif. The most recent paintings
are tightly focussed, attuned to the present
moment; fluidly sketched pieces in fiery
pinks and citrus are accompanied by more
ambitious scenes, including the towering
canvas “Neue Frau” (“New Woman”), in
which a portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cor-
tez against a cityscape is attended by a blue
streamer rising up from the bottom of the
composition, as if rooting for the young con-
gresswoman’s ascent.—J.F. (levygorvy.com)Willa Nasatir
This young American artist is best known
for her painterly photographs, for which she
shoots (and re-shoots) found-object assem-
blages, rendered otherworldly in her studio
with mirrors and in-camera effects. The
four paintings in her new show at Chapter
(viewable online) are compositional cousins
to those pictures, but they’re also appeal-
ingly airier, with a springtime palette and
swirly patterns that invite thoughts of Lilly
Pulitzer gone experimental. The outlines
of recognizable objects emerge from lay-
ered, abstract tangles. Zippers, a cougar’s
face, a bootprint, and a bird in flight are
easy to spot; more ambiguous forms are
lurking, too, if you look long enough at the
jumbled shapes. A piece titled “Alligator”
edges close to narrative: the reptile’s snout
overlaps with a figure in silhouette, dragging
itself out of harm’s way. Here, Nasatir’spastel, sun-dappled puzzle becomes a Tro-
jan horse for drama.—J.F. (chapter-ny.com)“Art at a Time Like This”
How can we think of art at a time like this?
That question, posed by the New York curators
Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen in this
online-only exhibition, is answered in poignant
and provocative ways by an eclectic group of
international artists. Each of the posts (there
are new entries daily) features images and a
short reflection on the COVID-19 crisis. Ai
Weiwei captures a pivotal moment with haunt-ing photos from Wuhan in early February, of an
intensive-care unit and the empty city center.
In Rosana Paulino’s watercolors of mythic en-
tities, the Brazilian artist draws connections
between her country’s history of slavery and
the consequences of Bolsonaro’s far-right
rule, exacerbated by the disease’s spread. The
New York artist Hunter Reynolds reflects on
the devastation of another virus, H.I.V., in
stitched photo collages that incorporate scans
of newspaper clippings. Although art may be
deemed nonessential in the current crisis, it
is some consolation that artists are respond-
ing nonetheless.—J.F. (artatatimelikethis.com)