THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 5
As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements
in advance and to check the requirements for
in-person attendance.
COURTESY LUHRING AUGUSTINE / FRANCESCA GALLOWAY
Ages before Vasily Kandinsky began hearing colors and seeing sounds,
painters in India were translating melodies into gem-bright miniatures,
inscribed with poems, in a genre known as ragamala. Fourteen alluring
examples—part of a series made around 1630-50—fill a room in the
wonderful show “Court, Epic, Spirit,” on view through March 24 at
Luhring Augustine, in Tribeca. Co-organized with London’s Francesca
Galloway gallery, the exhibition is a whirlwind tour of Indian art, from
the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, in just twenty-nine
pieces, most of them paintings. Ask for a magnifying glass at the front
desk, the better to lose yourself in the details: a pearl-and-gold pierc-
ing in an elephant’s ear at the coronation of Rama; a peacock in a tree
overlooking a gang of drug-addled sadhus; the gray-flecked beard of “A
Man of Commanding Presence” (pictured above). There are decorative
flourishes, too, including a tall cotton panel intricately printed with
flora and fauna in crimson and green, used to line what must have been
a magnificent tent, pitched for royalty on the Coromandel Coast in the
mid-seventeenth century—glampers, take note.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
1
A RT
“Charles Ray: Figure Ground”
America’s most enthralling contemporary sculp-
tor is an artistic and philosophical provocateur
whose ever-startling creations look back in
spirit, if rarely in appearance, to the sublimity
of ancient Greek art. “Space is the sculptor’s
primary medium,” Ray once said, and the point
is emphasized in this succinct retrospective at
the Met by the dispersal of nineteen pieces in
two cavernous rooms. As you wander the in-
stallation, the prevalent emptiness becomes an
aesthetic stimulus in itself. Each item, sampling
Ray’s multifarious subjects and means, scores
a discrete shock. “Family Romance” (1993),
in painted fibreglass and synthetic hair, de-
picts a dad, a mom, a young son, and a tod-
dler daughter, all naked and exactly the same
height (that of a child eight or so years old).
The piece is fraught with inexplicable emotion
and, once seen, apt to take up permanent resi-
dence in your memory. Labor-intensive recent
works—figurative pieces that Ray develops
in clay before they are machined from single
blocks of aluminum, or carved in solid cypress
by Japanese woodworkers—rivet and bemuse.
But one troubles me: “Archangel” (2021), a
huge wooden carving identified as Gabriel,
revered in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim re-
ligious lore. The figure is Ray’s response to
terrorist atrocities in France, such as theCharlie
Hebdomassacre. Though beautiful, it strikes me
as well-meaning to a fault—we-are-the-world
sentimental. I hope it proves to be a passing tour
de force among a tremendous artist’s disciplined
sallies, reliably multivalent in meaning, across
aesthetic and thematic frontiers that, but for
him, we wouldn’t know existed.—Peter Schjeldahl
(Metropolitan Museum of Art; through June 5.)
Marcus Jahmal
The flaming horizons of cadmium red and fuch-
sia favored by this impressive Brooklyn-born
painter situate his distilled arrangements of
lone figures and symbolic motifs—a raven, a
lasso, bare twiggy trees—in a mythic, cataclys-
mic realm. Jahmal is self-taught but attuned to
art-historical precedent, and he cites German
Expressionism as an influence. The mood of
that movement’s cinema is as palpable here as
the mood of its painters—the desolation and
the arresting distortions of “The Cabinet of
Dr.Caligari” come to mind. In the painting
“Living off the land,” a towering male nude
stands on a white car, his dark silhouette cutting
into a red sky; a similar figure in “Silver Disap-
pearance” is outlined in white on a ground of
rich black, which neither the blazing petals of
an orange flower nor the flames of a barbecue
can sufficiently light. The title of Jahmal’s show,
“Mining,” is apt—he draws, with a rare immedi-
acy, from deep psychological terrain.—Johanna
Fateman (Anton Kern; through Feb. 26.)
Kate Millett
In 1967, when Millett first exhibited the “Fan-
tasy Furniture” on view in this surprising
show, she was just three years away from the
publication of her feminist classic, “Sexual
Politics,” a mind-blowing hybrid of literary
criticism and polemic. The quasi-functional
sculptures—tables, chairs, cabinets, a bed—are
anthropomorphized domestic objects, in which
found elements combine with others that were
hand-carved or upholstered by the artist. Mil-
lett’s not quite figures are at once goofy and
strange. Fluted or cabriole legs alternate with
puppet-like limbs; a slatted chair back, painted
bright red, is inset with a pair of blue eyes; a
china cabinet is topped by a smooth wooden
head. In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965,
an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen
Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky
centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by
rolling-pin finial nipples. On the surface, these
surreal pieces, which Millett made during her
involvement with the feminist-Fluxus avant-
garde of downtown New York, might seem to
be a world away from the best-seller that landed
her on the cover ofTime. But the sculptures
and the book share her mordant, synthesizing
brilliance, so indispensable in the early years of
women’s lib.—J.F. (Salon 94; through March 5.)
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MUSIC
Big Thief: “Dragon New Warm
Mountain I Believe in You”
ROCK The Brooklyn band Big Thief has become
one of the most salient acts of the twenty-tens.
Led by the singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker,
alongside the guitarist Buck Meek, the bass-
ist Max Oleartchik, and the drummer James
Krivchenia, the unit has steadily grown more
tight-knit and ambitious since its début, in
- In 2019, Big Thief ascended with two
spectacular albums—“U.F.O.F.” and “Two
Hands”—that spanned intimate revelations
and vast soundscapes. For a follow-up, its first
music without the producer Andrew Sarlo, the
band looked within to survey its now sweep-
ing sound. Krivchenia suggested that they
travel across the country—to upstate New
York, Topanga Canyon, the Sonoran Desert,
the Colorado mountains—recording with dif-
ferent engineers in each place. The resulting
