THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 9
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND O’FLAHERTY’S
Artists have been moonlighting as gallerists in New York City since
at least 1905, when Edward Steichen lent Alfred Stieglitz a studio, at
291 Fifth Avenue, that became a launchpad for the avant-garde. Now,
at a moment when the words “gallery” and “dealership” are often used
interchangeably—as if works of art were cars on a lot—the audacious
artist Jamian Juliano-Villani has opened O’Flaherty’s, in cahoots with
her fellow-painter Billy Grant and the musician Ruby Zarsky. The
storefront space, situated at 55 Avenue C, announces its presence with
a neon sign in a winningly garish turquoise. (Picture an Irish pub by
way of “Miami Vice.”) Juliano-Villani has said that her plan is “to show
art that is not afraid of itself,” and the gallery’s inaugural exhibition,
“Dingle Does O’Flaherty’s” (on view through Oct. 8), certainly meets
that criterion, spanning the fifty-year career of the Los Angeles ren-
egade Kim Dingle. The main room, strewn with cans of White Claw
and broken scissors, suggests a wild party at which no one is checking
I.D.s. The guests are painted porcelain figures of toddler-age girls—un-
cannily lifelike tutu-clad statues, from 1993, that Dingle calls “Psycho
Tods.” (A photographic doppelgänger appears in the 2021 installation
“Wall Smasher 2,” pictured above.) Still under construction on my
O’Flaherty’s visit was a clapback to the dealmaking sanctum known
in gallery parlance as the “back room”: a secret clubhouse, behind a
locked door labelled “cool people.”—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
neer Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) meeting
cute in the underbrush, and their campout plays
like the start of a big affair. The duo, joined by
Boone’s Uncle Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt), an antic
old coot who turns out to be a serious explorer
with a deep and loving knowledge of Native
American culture, signs on for a fur-trading
expedition up the Missouri River in country
belonging to the Blackfoot Confederacy—a
mission that depends on the protection of a
young Blackfoot woman named Teal Eye (Eliz-
abeth Threatt), whom the men are returning
to her family. Boone’s long-festering hatred of
“Indians” threatens the mission, but, as ever
with Hawks, conflict feeds love—which proves
even more dangerous. The struggle with ene-
mies and the elements leaves its marks on Jim,
from a sprained ankle and a gunshot wound to
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McArthur Binion
Behind each big magnetic abstraction in this
Chicago-based painter’s current exhibition at
the Lehmann Maupin gallery is what Binion
describes as the work’s “under-conscious,” a
collage of photocopied images pairing personal
history (the artist’s childhood home, his birth
certificate, the handwritten pages of his old
address book) with collective trauma (photo-
documentation of lynchings). Seen from a
distance, these expressively constructed,
dense backgrounds provide an energetic foil
for the richly textured stripes, delicate lines,
and undulating mosaic patterns that over-
lay them. In the past, the artist has favored
sombre earth tones, and they are still present
here, uplifted by electric colors. In “Mod-
ern:Ancient:Brown,” the painting that lends
the exhibition its name, a multicolored mesh
plays optical tricks with splotchy squares of
vibrant pigment in sapphire, emerald, vio-
let, fuchsia, canary, and more: the “brown”
of the painting’s title refers to the color of
the artist’s skin. For forty years, Binion has
been exposing the fault lines of modernism by
inserting his subjectivity—his body, his biogra-
phy—into the supposedly objective form of the
grid.—Johanna Fateman (lehmannmaupin.com)
Jorge Pardo
Ten entropic paintings, an unusual chande-
lier, and a high-concept couch are among the
seductive elements of “All Bets Are Off,” the
eleventh show at the Petzel gallery by this Cu-
ban-born artist, who is now based in Mexico.
These works continue Pardo’s three-decade dis-
solution of the boundary between art and décor.
(The exhibition coincides with the release of
a handsome new book on the artist’s public
projects and commissions.) The paintings
derive their heft and fragmented appearance
from a digital process of image manipulation.
Their wide-ranging sources—including vin-
tage photographs, Spirograph doodles, and
pre-Columbian iconography—are engraved by
a laser onto plywood, then painted with acrylic.
The aforementioned light fixture—a sculpture
titled “Gisela”—is the show’s ambience-es-
tablishing centerpiece. Made of wood, metal,
and painted plastic pieces that evoke delicate
alien vertebrae, it seems to hover and spin, an
extraterrestrial representative of Pardo’s vision
of the Gesamtkunstwerk.—J.F. (petzel.com)
Yuli Yamagata
In 2004, the Anton Kern gallery organized an
unforgettable show titled “SCREAM,” iden-
tifying a new glam-grotesque aesthetic in the
work of young artists influenced by horror mov-
ies. A sequel of sorts has arrived at the gallery:
“Sweet Dreams, Nosferatu,” the striking début
of Yuli Yamagata, a wildly imaginative, thirty-
one-year-old Brazilian artist who’s fascinated by
the macabre—from vampires to manga—and by
the tension between revulsion and beauty. Of
the twenty-one vividly colorful pieces on view
(through Oct. 23), the most seductive are at
once soft sculptures and paintings, sewn from
silk, elastane, felt, patterned fabric, velvet,
and cloth that Yamagata hand-dyes using a shi-
bori technique, a nod to her Japanese ancestry.
The subjects of these big, perversely enticing
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MOVIES
The Big Sky
Howard Hawks’s loose-limbed 1952 Western
begins with the jaunty gunslinger Jim Deakins
(Kirk Douglas) and the aggressive young pio-
works include a manicured claw, a goat’s head,
a bat, and an opulent cephalopod titled “Yoru
Ika.” The last might be an homage to a vam-
pire-adjacent genre of trans-species erotica,
famously portrayed in Hokusai’s 1814 ukiyo-e
woodcut “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,”
in which an octopus takes a human being as a
lover.—Andrea K. Scott (antonkerngallery.com)
