THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 5
COURTESY THE ARTISTS AND DEREK ELLER GALLERY
Picture Alexander Calder weaving dream catchers at Stonehenge. The
results might resemble the superbly weird sculptures of Michelle Segre.
The native New Yorker’s colorful concatenations begin with yarn, metal,
paint, wire, and thread, and extend to ingredients that are so sorcerous
they might as well include eye of newt. Three recent examples of Segre’s
irresistible work (including “Just Why Do You Think You’re a Plant?,”
above) are on view, downtown, at the Derek Eller gallery (through
March 8). Uptown, at Ceysson & Bénétière (through March 14), Segre
has convened ten like-minded artists in a dynamic group show, titled
“Cult of the Crimson Queen.”—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
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“Peter Saul:
Crime and Punishment”
New Museum
The timeliest as well as the rudest paint-
ing show of this winter happens to be the
first-ever New York museum survey of this
American aesthetic rapscallion. Recognition
so delayed bemuses almost as much as a re-
minder of the artist’s current age: eighty-
five, which seems impossible. Saul’s cartoony
style—raucously grotesque, often with con-
torted figures engaged in (and quite enjoying)
intricate violence, caricatures of politicians
from Nixon to Trump that come off as much
fond as fierce, and cheeky travesties of clas-
sic paintings by Rembrandt, Picasso, and
de Kooning—suggests the gall of an adoles-
cent allowed to run amok. It takes time to
become aware of how well Saul paints, with
lyrically kinetic, intertwined forms and an
improbable approximation of chiaroscuro,
managed with neon-toned Day-Glo acryl-
ics. He sneaks whispery formal nuances into
works whose predominant effect may be as
subtle as that of a steel garbage can being
kicked downstairs. Not everyone takes the
time. Saul’s effrontery has long driven fastid-
ious souls, including me years ago, from gal-
leries. Now I see him as part of a story of art
and culture that has been unspooling since the
nineteen-fifties; one in which Saul, formerly
a pariah, seems ever more a paladin.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Through May 31.)
Gladys Nilsson
Greenan
CHELSEA The new paintings in this exhibition
teem with alien vegetation and freewheeling
creatures—evidence that age hasn’t slowed this
Chicago artist, who is now seventy-nine. The
orgiastic, nine-foot-long “Gleefully Askew,”
from 2017, shows a cartoonish orange woman,
nude but for a ruffled apron, painting with a
preternaturally long, flexible arm. Two men
serve as her unsteady easel. At the Matthew
Marks gallery, a companion survey charts Nils-
son’s course from the nineteen-sixties, when she
was a member of the Hairy Who (a subset of
the Chicago Imagists), through 1980. The lurid
palette and Expressionist style of Nilsson’s
early works—such as “Nightclub,” from 1964,
with its goblin face and cabaret dancers—give
way to fantastic abandon and goofily sexual
Boschian detail. The painter’s most seductive
scenes are busy with anthropomorphic shapes
and pulsating patterns that spill onto her sculp-
tural frames. A dusky, speckled landscape of
abstract succulent and animal forms, from
1973, is characteristic of the artist’s exuberant
approach—its title, “More,” could be the motto
of her prodigious career.—Johanna Fateman
(Through March 14.)
Senta Simond
Danziger
UPTOWN This young Swiss photographer shoots
her beautiful subjects in natural light, and in
the platonic-erotic glow of close friendship.
Simond credits the intimate, spontaneous
mood of her portraits to her unfussy pro-
cess: she enlists women she knows (some
have been her models for a decade) and uses
minimal equipment in non-studio settings.
Familiarity and trust yield transfixing images
of sexual self-possession—images that once
might have been said to smack of the male
gaze.The fifteen black-and-white pictures
in Simond’s U.S. début show women in deep
thought and states of undress, their unin-
hibited poses made thrilling by the artist’s
bold camera angles, cropped compositions,
and unmistakable fascination. The silvery
photographs, in their chic metal frames, have
a vintage cinematic quality, but exact allusions
are hard to pin down. The young subject of
the portrait “Soumeya,” who wears a white
poet’s blouse, her dark mane arcing over her
downcast face, might be from yesterday, from
the early twentieth century, or from a pe-
riod drama—though which period is hard to
s a y.—J.F. (Through Feb. 29.)
“Sounds Lasting and Leaving”
Luxembourg & Dayan
UPTOWN Taking its title from an intriguing
note about “musical sculpture” from Marcel
Duchamp, this century-spanning exhibition
of sound works (broadly defined) establishes a
surprising lineage of artists who have explored
overlaps of the aural and the optical. Marina
Abramović provides a dramatic start with her
black-and-white film “Freeing the Voice,” from
1975, which documents a performance in which
she wailed until her vocal cords gave out. A
simple Calder mobile, from 1940, descrip-
tively titled “Red Disc and Gong,” makes a
subtler statement—its horizontally suspended
mallet promises to, eventually, gently strike
a piece of sheet metal. Also on view are more
recent works by contemporary artists. Der-
rick Adams and Philippe Treuille draw on
Calder’s sonic experiments with the composer
Edgard Varèse, pairing an original score with
