6 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY ABBEY LOSSING
Ten days after 9/11, when people’s spirits desperately needed a lift, PBS
aired the first episode of “Art in the Twenty-first Century,” a fly-on-the-
wall documentary series that bet (with all due respect to Sister Wendy)
that artists are the best guides to their own work. Maya Lin, Sally Mann,
and Kerry James Marshall were among those who welcomed cameras
into their studios for the first season. So did the sculptor Andrea Zittel,
whose functional sleeping pods in the California desert now look like
enviable spots to shelter in place. Today, after nine broadcast seasons—a
tenth arrives later this year—two Peabody Awards, an Emmy nomina-
tion, and many digital-only shorts produced for its Web site, Art 21 is
streaming more than five hundred films at art21.org. Subjects range from
household names (Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei) to young painters
on the rise (Aliza Nisenbaum, Avery Singer) to the Bay Area-based
social-practice artist Stephanie Syjuco, whose latest project is sewing
COVID-19 masks for food-bank volunteers, the families of medical work-
ers, and others in need. Art 21 also bundles its films into visual “playlists,”
with running times of one to two hours; to combat cabin fever, watch
fourteen artists take to the open road in “En Route.”—Andrea K. ScottARTISTSTO WATC H
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Gerhard Richter
The shock of eight new abstractions titled
“Birkenau,” based on clandestine photographs
that were smuggled out of Auschwitz in 1944,
retroactively exposes a thread of sorrow and
guilt in the invariably subtle work of this
German painter. (The Met Breuer’s Rich-
ter exhibition, “Painting After All,” is now
closed, but there’s a virtual version online.)
Who dares take history’s ultimate obscenity
as a theme for art? For Richter, the provo-
cation makes biographical sense. Born in
Dresden in 1932, he is haunted by memories
and associations from the Third Reich and
the Second World War. Previously indirect in
his references to the horror, he has reason to
focus on it now: this might be the last show
of his six-decade career as a chameleon stylist
and a visual philosopher of painting. Richter
brings to everything an attitude of radical
skepticism, but it has dawned on many of us,
over the years, that plenty of emotion, like
banked fire, underlies his restless ways. While
never forsaking representation—as seen in
portraits of his wife and their children, which
radiate Titianesque color—he took up chro-
matic abstraction in the seventies, overlaying
brushed, slathered, and scraped swaths of
paint. Miraculously, often staggeringly beau-tiful, those pictures provide the chief plea-
sures here.—Peter Schjeldahl (metmuseum.org)Srijon Chowdhury
In Chowdhury’s eerily beautiful world, the
mythic and the contemporary merge. The Ban-
gladeshi painter, who now divides his time
between Portland, Oregon, and L.A., channels
the macabre effervescence of Odilon Redon in
the centerpiece of his New York début, at Foxy
Production (viewable on the gallery’s Web
site). Titled “Pale Rider,” the canvas recasts
the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse as a
woman on a spectral mount; the incongruous
backdrop of vibrant wildflowers behind a lattice
of text takes some cues from the Viennese Se-
cessionists. (Size doesn’t translate onscreen, but
it’s worth noting that the picture is sixteen feet
long.) Other paintings, including a still-life of
clementines, a nighttime view of Notre Dame,
and portraits—of a father and child, a female
Narcissus in jeans, and a Christlike male nude
holding a glowing rose—seductively blur gen-
der roles and art-historical lexicons.—Johanna
Fateman (foxyproduction.com)Jeanette Mundt
As New York City’s resourceful small galleries
launch online viewing rooms, Company’s is
notably chic. The New York painter Jeanette
Mundt, whose renditions of female gymnasts
impressed at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, is
represented there with her ominous pictures
of crows; you can also view her recent exhi-
bition, which was cut short by the pandemic.
The theme of fire unites scattershot subjects
and styles, and Mundt’s feverish palette feels
suited to the present moment. In one picture,
a person runs through an impressionistically
rendered blaze; another evokes Joan of Arc
with a beatific woman’s face veiled in flames.
The title of the series, “Still American,” sug-
gests an underlying political critique, one
made all the more strange and compelling for
being open-ended. The gallery is also hosting
“In Company With,” a charmingly anarchic
digital event series featuring performances
and readings on Instagram Live and films by
artists (including Raúl de Nieves and Barbara
Hammer) on Vimeo.—J.F. (companygallery.us)Brandon Ndife
The title of this young sculptor’s new series, “My
Zone,” seems clairvoyant in hindsight: Ndife’s
show at the Bureau gallery was slated to open on
March 20, the same day that New York’s nones-
sential businesses were ordered to close. Since
then, his otherworldly amalgams of the man-
made and the organic have languished alone.
(You can visit them in the gallery’s viewing room,
bureau-inc.com, and you should, but know that
seeing sculpture remotely can be a frustratingly
disembodied experience.) The tone of Ndife’s
work is oracular, too, as cabinets and shelves,
both built by the artist and salvaged, appear
under siege by nature, bulging with corn husks,
algae, elm roots, and dirt alongside abandoned
dish racks and plates. The mood splits the differ-
ence between transmogrifying and enduring; an
alternate title for Ndife’s show might be “Change
Is Inevitable.” These furniture-sculptures have
the talismanic power of Congolese nkisi figures,
which incorporate seeds, nuts, and plants, and
the same restless, phantasmagoric energy that
led the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara to write aboutas well be subtitled “Diva Week,” with Angela
Gheorghiu in “La Rondine” (April 15), Anna
Netrebko in “Adriana Lecouvreur” (April 18),
and Renée Fleming in “Der Rosenkavalier”
(April 19). Each weekend, viewers can cast their
vote, on the Met’s Facebook and Instagram
pages, for the opera to be shown the following
Friday; streams are available for twenty-three
hours.—Oussama Zahr (April 15-21 at 7:30.)