14 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN
Johannes Vermeer and the aerospace industry rarely come up in the same
conversation. But they connect in the celestial sculptures of Helen Pash-
gian, who should be as acclaimed as James Turrell or Robert Irwin. All
three artists were part of a loosely affiliated (and mostly male) group, based
in L.A. in the late nineteen-sixties, that shared an interest in geometric
abstraction and luminosity, experimenting with new materials then being
developed by NASA. Pashgian first set out to be an art historian, making
close study of the Dutch Masters’ translucent layering, but when offered
a spot in a Harvard Ph.D. program, in 1958, she declined in order to
concentrate on her own art. Within a decade, she had pioneered a rad-
ical process of casting hot resin with elements of solid acrylic, resulting
in small, lambent orbs that appear, somewhat miraculously, to contain
infinite shafts of light. (A recent series is pictured above.) The transcen-
dently beautiful exhibition “Helen Pashgian: Spheres and Lenses” at the
Lehmann Maupin gallery (on view through Jan. 8) is the artist’s first solo
show in New York City in fifty years. Linger in the “Lens” installations, in
which epoxy discs seem to float, vanish, and rematerialize in two darkened
rooms over the course of five mind-expanding minutes.—Andrea K. ScottAT THEGALLERIES
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Genieve Figgis
The faces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury nobility—unidentified characters, un-
bound by obligations to historical accuracy—
are rendered stricken, smushed, or cadaverous
in this Irish artist’s gooey whorls of acrylic
paint. In some dozen recent canvases, on view
at the Almine Rech gallery, Figgis imagines
a fanciful European past, populated mostly
by ladies, who appear both sickly sweet and
ghastly. Powdered wigs, parasols, parlors, and
formal gardens emerge from muddled flurries
of wet-on-wet brushwork. The seductive, ham-
fisted weirdness of her figuration (not to men-
tion her interest in aristocracy) may recall the
paintings of Karen Kilimnik, but Figgis takes a
distinct pleasure in her medium’s cake-frosting
viscosity, and has an Edward Gorey-worthy
flair for the macabre. Group portraits are a
favorite motif; among the highlights of this ex-
hibition are the cream-and-coral-hued “Trip to
Egypt,” which shows an imperialist entourage
posing beside the Sphinx, and “Victorian Peo-
ple,” in which a colorful crowd is haunted by
more than a few drippy pastel ghosts.—Johanna
Fateman (alminerech.com)“Milford Graves:
Fundamental Frequency”
The extraordinary percussionist Milford
Graves didn’t keep time—he set it free, seeing
beyond the convention of drummer-as-met-
ronome and tuning into the polyrhythmic
vibrations of the body. (His interest in heart-
beats led to professional training as a cardiac
technician and years of EKG-inspired impro-
visations.) Graves, who died in February, at
the age of seventy-nine, is legendary for his
metamorphic free jazz, but his creative vision
enlightened much more than music, as this
abundant exhibition at Artists Space makes
joyously clear. A revered martial artist, Gravesinvented a new form called Yara—Yoruba for
“nimble”—which he taught in a dojo he ran
from his family’s Queens home, where he
also maintained a lush garden in his role as
an herbalist. The hand-painted, embellished
“Yara Training Bag,” made around 1990, that
greets visitors at the entrance to the show
prefigures the bristling, shamanic sculptures
Graves began to create near the end of his
life—always breaking new ground.—AndreaK.
Scott (artistsspace.org)Paulina Olowska
Earlier this year, Helene Winer and Janelle
Reiring announced that they were closing
Metro Pictures, the gallery that they co-
founded in 1981, marking the end of an era.
Its first exhibition, which opened in Novem-
ber, 1981, was a group show of artists—Cindy
Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Robert Longo
among them—who went on to define their
generation. Now Metro Pictures signs off
with a solo exhibition by Paulina Olowska.
In a short video and large, lush oil paintings,
the Polish artist draws on both American and
Eastern European popular culture, notably
fashion photography, to memorialize women’s
collectives. In the show’s title work, “Haus
Proud,” four young women (who might be
taken for members of a New Wave band) stand
before a mural that pays tribute to Soviet tech-
nical schools but is stencilled with graffiti that
reads “capitalism also depends on domestic
labour.” Another canvas combines a social-re-
alist subject with a glam-squad perspective,
portraying a pair of broom-wielding cleaners
as runway models. In a sly homage to the gal-
lery’s swan song, Olowska accessorizes one of
the women with a metal pail emblazoned with
the word “Metro.”—J.F. (metropictures.com)“Surrealism Beyond Borders”
This huge, deliriously entertaining show, at
the Met, surveys the transnational spread of
Surrealism, a movement that was codified
by the poet and polemicist André Breton in
1924, in Paris. (It had roots in Dada, which
emerged in Zurich, in 1916, in infuriated, tac-
tically clownish reaction to the pointlessly
murderous First World War.) Most of the
show’s hundreds of works—and nearly all
of the best—date from the next twenty or so
years. As you would expect, there’s the lobster-
topped telephone by Salvador Dalí and the
locomotive emerging from a fireplace by René
Magritte, both from 1938 and crowd-pleasers
to this day. But the show’s superb curators,
Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale,
prove that the craze for Surrealism surged like
a prairie fire independently in individuals and
groups in some forty-five countries around
the world. The tinder was an insurrectionary
spirit, disgusted with establishments. Painting
and photography dominate, though maga-
zines, texts, and films explore certain scenes.
The variety of discoveries, detailed with ex-
ceptional scholarship in a ravishing keeper of
a catalogue, defeat generalization, with such
tonic shocks as “The Sea” (1929), a fantasia by
the Japanese Koga Harue that displays, among
other things, a bathing beauty, a zeppelin,
swimming fish, and a flayed submarine, and
“Untitled” (1967), a weaponized throng of
human and animal faces and figures, by the
Mozambican Malangatana Ngwenya.—Peter
Schjeldahl (metmuseum.org)