6 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
COURTESY THE ARTIST / MAGENTA PLAINSA lay figure is an articulated mannequin used by artists in lieu of live
models. For the American painter Sascha Braunig, whose primary
subject is the female figure as a metaphysical category, rather than as
an entity of flesh and blood, the depersonalized studio tool is a rich
symbol—one whose name she borrows to title her two-part exhibition
at Magenta Plains and François Ghebaly, on view through April 16.
Cropped torsos with the dramatic proportions of a cinched hourglass
occupy an electric dreamscape, in canvases that reference a host of
works by artists who’ve similarly toyed with images of exaggerated
femininity (the corseted forms of Christina Ramberg, the patterned
silhouettes of the Chicago Imagist Suellen Rocca) in kindred strains
of Pop surrealism. Braunig’s five-foot-tall painting “Meret” might refer
to Meret Oppenheim, who also deployed a kind of satirical fetishism
in her work; it portrays a leather-gloved hand adjusting a slinky blue
net, while plaited laces in black and red descend below it in endless
vertical rows. Elsewhere, thorny scaffolding, taut laces, and skeleton
hands exact wasp-waisted obedience from lasers, drinking straws,
and dresses (as seen in “Study for Clutches 1,” above), proof that
the artist is nowhere close to exhausting the anatomical absurdity of
her theme.—Johanna FatemanATTHE GALLERIES
It became one of the most reproduced sculp-
tures of France’s post-abolition era, a collect-
ible for private homes and, supposedly, an
emblem of freedom. This elegant, essayistic
show at the Met, co-curated by Elyse Nel-
son and Wendy S. Walters, ripples outward
from a carved-marble iteration of the fa-
mous work. A selection of related objects by
Carpeaux’s contemporaries—including “The
Freedman,” an 1863 bronze by John Quincy
Adams Ward, which depicts a similarly an-
guished, nearly nude male subject, also in a
torqued pose—illuminates how Carpeaux’s
romantic, eroticized representation of an
unnamed enslaved woman reinforced racist
Western traditions in figurative art. Contem-
porary commentary is also included: Kara
Walker’s “Negress,” from 2017, a plaster
impression of Carpeaux’s bust, is installeddirectly on the floor, where it assumes the
presence of a discarded mold, evoking the
hollowness of the French sculptor’s anti-slav-
ery gesture, which tacitly catered to the
French colonial fascination with Africa. At
times, the exhibition feels more didactic than
necessary, but, over all, it delivers powerful
lessons without foreclosing interpretation
or inquiry.—Johanna Fateman (Metropolitan
Museum of Art; through March, 2023.)Stefan Tcherepnin
In the past, this Brooklyn-based artist and
musician has leveraged the outsized charm of
Cookie Monster, creating characters derived
from the Muppet for his multimedia works.
Tcherepnin’s new show, “Portal,” dispenses
with Cookie’s form, leaving only his goo-
gly eyes. Out of context, the cartoony eyes
can become generic shapes, and the artist
isolates the white disks, with their dilated
black pupils, to operate at the outer edges
of figuration. He situates them in vaguely
antlerlike sculptures made of bent copper,
which hang from the ceiling and rise from
the floor; their spindly forms recur in stark
black paintings, where they are surrounded
by runelike and rootlike arrangements. These
vaguely mystic motifs also appear in a video
animation (whose spare electronic score was
created in collaboration with Anders Enge).
Adding to the considerable enigma of it all is
a small, naturalistic drawing of a stag, titled
“In Another Life.” It presides over the show
like a mascot—or maybe a god, whose antlers
inspired Tcherepnin’s lyrical near-abstrac-
tions.—J.F. (Meredith Rosen; through April 23.)“Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept”
This startlingly coherent and bold exhibition
is a material manifesto of late-pandemic in-
stitutional culture. Long on installations and
videos and short on painting, conventional
sculpture, and straight photography, it is ex-
citing without being especially pleasurable—
geared toward thought. The innovative, inti-
mately collaborative curators David Breslin
and Adrienne Edwards ignore rather than
oppose pressures of the ever-romping art
market, which can see to itself. Delayed for
a year by COVID-19, the show consolidates
a trend that many of us hadn’t suspected: a
sort of fortuitously shared conceptual sensi-
bility that suggests an in-group but is open
to all who care about art’s relations to the
wide world. My favorite work in the show
is the indelibly disturbing and enthralling
“Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021),
by the veteran Cuban American artist and
singularly plainspoken social activist Coco
Fusco—a gorgeous twelve-minute video ex-
ploration of Hart Island, New York’s potter’s
field for unidentified or unclaimed corpses.
Shots of the artist laboring in a rowboat
along its shores alternate with drone over-
views of a really quite lovely place where
rows of small stone markers perfunctorily
memorialize innumerable lost lives. Beauty
stands in for unconsummated mourning. The
work can seem to invoke both the cascading
fatalities of the COVID pandemic and, by
chance, the remorseless current carnage in
Ukraine.—Peter Schjeldahl (Whitney Museum;
through Sept. 5.)championed early in her career. Meade and
the pianist Myra Huang perform pieces by
Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Amy Beach,
among others.—O.Z. (Kaufman Music Center;
April 14 at 7:30.)
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“Fictions of Emancipation:
Carpeaux Recast”
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s bust “Why Born
Enslaved!,” modelled in plaster in 1868,
portrays a Black woman in bondage, a rope
looped tightly around her arms and across
her mostly bare chest, her head turned away.