6 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
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THETHEATRE
Hangmen
The end of the death penalty in mid-nineteen-
sixties Britain is fertile ground for Martin
McDonagh’s sardonic, morbid humor; it’s hard
to think of another contemporary playwright
able to mine laughs from the story of a former
executioner whose biggest regret is that his
body count wasn’t quite high enough. Such is
the fate of the self-important, casually cruel
Harry Wade (David Threlfall), who now runs
a pub and lords over his family and a court of
sycophantic, hapless barflies. Then one day a
dapper and vaguely menacing stranger named
Peter Mooney (Alfie Allen, from “Game of
Thrones”) pops out of nowhere to disrupt
this cozy, sad little world. The ensemble cast
makes McDonagh’s exuberant language shine,
and Matthew Dunster’s superb production,
which originated at the Royal Court Theatre,For nearly a year, the Marian Goodman gallery has been keeping a se-
cret: an unannounced show by Gabriel Orozco, which remains on view
through the summer of 2023. A floor below the gallery’s HQ, on West
Fifty-seventh Street, a closed door discreetly marked “Spacetime” opens
into a one-man Wunderkammer that combines an archive’s deep dive
with the spontaneous pleasures of a studio visit. Never mind that this
globe-trotting artist, who now mostly splits his time between Tokyo and
Mexico City, has spent his three-decade career avoiding the trappings of
a professional studio, in projects that have taken him from Paris, where
he converted a vintage Citroën into a streamlined sculpture in 1993 (a
toy-size model is on view), to Bali, where, starting in 2017, he spent
two years collaborating with master carvers on limestone abstractions
inspired by dice. Games, with their combination of systems and chance,
are central to Orozco’s work, as is the convergence of the man-made and
the natural worlds, as seen above in his photograph “Porcupine Eating
a Tortilla,” from 2016.—Andrea K. ScottAT THEGALLERIES
of seven colored suns encircling a “mother
sun,” setting him on a lifelong mission to
catalogue and describe the universe using a
singular lexical-spiritual approach. (Bouabré
died in 2014, at the age of ninety-one.) A
series of drawings from 1991, made in ball-
point pen and colored pencil, commemorates
that divine revelation at MOMA in “World
Unbound,” an expansive survey that con-
veys the artist’s creative force and modern
ambition. But the centerpiece of the show
is “Alphabet Bété,” also completed in 1991,
a syllabary of four hundred and forty-nine
drawings installed in a vast grid; the fasci-
nating, visually forthright phonetic key is
illustrated with a dizzying array of images,
from quotidian objects and actions to animals
and disembodied limbs. Bouabré devised the
writing system to record the oral language of
his people, the Bété, and initially published
it in an academic journal in 1958. The index
eventually became his preoccupying form. A
glossary of facial markings, “Musée du visage
africain” (“Museum of the African Face”),
from 1991-97, is one focussed example, as is
a later compendium of global democracies;
the long-running series “Conaissance du
monde” (“Knowledge of the World”), which
Bouabré worked on for more than two de-
cades, starting in 1987, covers topics as diverse
as rainbows, human rights, and hieroglyphs.
Bouabré was energized, rather than daunted
by, the inexhaustible nature of the projects
he undertook, and his inspiring, overdue ret-
rospective is bound to leave viewers yearning
to see more.—Johanna Fateman (Museum of
Modern Art; through Aug. 13.)“Holbein: Capturing Character”
There’s a new old painter in town: Hans Hol-
bein the Younger, the dazzling Renaissance
specialist in portraiture, with his first major
American show of paintings, at the Morgan
Library. The German artist, who died in 1543,
while in service to England’s Henry VIII, is
familiar to New Yorkers from a hands-down
masterpiece, on loan from the Frick: “Sir
Thomas More” (1527), a portrait of the great
humanist and future Lord High Chancellorof England. That More’s head was lopped
off, in 1535, for objecting to Henry’s religious
policies is an incidental piquancy—you can’t
deduce much about the period’s upheavals,
except obliquely, from Holbein’s career as a
hired-gun celebrant of whoever employed him,
most decisively Henry. But Holbein proved
very, very good at modernizing the kicked-up
realism of Northern Renaissance styles. Con-
sider, and be wowed by, his renderings of skin:
aglow with light that can appear either to fall
upon or to radiate from within a subject, if
not somehow both at once. Could Holbein
have been a greater artist if he’d been granted
imaginative license? Maybe and maybe not.
He would be different, and we would miss the
monumentality of his definitive achievement.
I came away at once thrilled and frustrated by
the legacy of a flabbergasting talent.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Morgan Library & Museum; through
May 15.)Evelyn Statsinger
Nature inspired Statsinger’s abstract paint-
ings from the nineteen-eighties and nineties,
but she exercised more than a little poetic
license, practicing what might be described
as a surrealist form of microscopy in her em-
broidery-like compositions. Cellular and
sinuous forms appear in viscous matrices
and against surfaces that suggest coral and
lichen. The canvases on view in this exhibi-
tion, curated by Dan Nadel, were made after
Statsinger moved to rural Michigan, in 1972;
at times, a sense of transition is evident, as
rupture and conflict vie with homeostasis. A
rootlike network in “Cross Currents,” from
1985, rendered in a moody autumnal palette,
frames what appears to be the ejection of a
dark blastocyst from a frayed, fibrous tube.
In “Forest Gift,” from 1987, a tentacular vine
creeps into the frame to disturb the liquid
center of a burnished umber platelet. Before
she turned to abstraction, the Brooklyn-born
artist, who died in 2016, at the age of eighty-
eight, favored a spectral strain of figuration;
early in her career, she was associated with a
Chicago artists’ group known as the Monster
Roster. A steady, albeit subtle, sense of the
monstrous and the grotesque gives Statsing-
er’s verdant world its seductively dangerous
edge.—J.F. (Gray; through June 18.)