While the opening of another gallery in Chelsea may not initially strike one as any more newsworthy than the opening of yet another Duane Read drugstore or Starbucks in midtown, it is unusual enough for an exhibition space to arrive on the scene with a ready-made roster of artists, each of whose work is individually distinctive yet indicative of a coherent communal vision. Such is the case with Monkdogz Urban Art, which opened amid much hoopla on March 11 and runs through April 15 at 547 West 27th Street and, on the strength of its inaugural exhibition, an international group show, promises to remain one of the more unpredictable stops in Chelsea.
The gallery’s director Bob Hogge and his business partner Marina Hadley began their talent hunt several months ago by issuing an open invitation to emerging artists to exhibit gratis on their successful website monkdogz.com. The democratic gesture drew a huge response from artists around the world, giving Hogge and Hadley an almost infinite range of international styles and tendencies to choose from. They then winnowed their selection down to a few that Hogge, a gifted painter himself who has chosen to make discovering the work of others his project of the moment, felt best expressed the aesthetic they hope to impose upon the prevailing zeitgeist.
Pressed to define exactly what that aesthetic is, one would have to hark back to the East Village art scene in the 1970s and 80s in terms of the energy, conviction, and enthusiasm on view albeit here on a global scale and with some of the rougher edges smoothed out by a good deal more technical proficiency and mature vision.
A matching fund of energy, conviction and enthusiasm emanates from the gallerists themselves. Hogge is a nonstop talker in the mode of Tony Schafrazi, the earlier artist-turned-gallerist who launched the mainstream careers of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and other East Village alumnae. Indeed, Hogge can riff like legendary Beat Generation motormouth Neal Cassady, once he gets going about his plans for expanding Monkdogz Urban Art in all manner of visionary directions. His belief in the project has caused him to turn his house in Long Beach (much to the bemused consternation of his supportive but beleaguered wife) into a kind of hostel for some of the international artists in this show. And one gets the feeling that if he were not careful it could turn into something resembling a hippie art commune with the charismatic Hogge as its resident guru.
Fortunately, though, Hogge has Hadley to curb his enthusiasm and keep an eye on the bottom line. An attractive, elegant Japanese-English woman with an upperclass British accent, Hadley is something of an art world neophyte. Still, she’s cracking the books to catch up on art history, and she has great taste and scads of experience as a corporate consultant, which should come in handy in the highly competitive gallery scene. As a complement to Bob Hogge’s manic, mile-a-minute energy, Marina Hadley may provide just the right balance to help turn Monkdogz into a winning proposition.
Another thing that could contribute to the long-term success of the enterprise is that, while most of the artists in the inaugural show have exhibited widely elsewhere, they seem to come into sharper focus and more into their own in each others’ company, indicating an ability on the part of the partners to connect the dots in a manner that could prove beneficial to all.
One such discovery (at least to New York gallery-goers, although he’s apparently widely exhibited closer to home) is Marcus van Soest, who hails from the Netherlands and comes on like gangbusters with canvases that seem to combine the painterly panache of late-period Philip Guston, the outrageous plasticity Peter Saul, and the sheer zaniness of the revered 1950s Mad magazine cartoonist Basil Wolverton. In his compacted figurative compositions, van Soest conjures up a kind of monster mash of fragmented faces, body parts, andin the case of one especially visceral canvasslabs of red meat and fried eggs that seem to express the delicious mess of being embroiled in the human stew. The 14th century Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings of human heads composed of fruits and vegetables also come to mind; however van Soest does all of his predecessors one better by virtue of his eclecticism, giving new meaning, with his bold protoplasmic configurations, to the term “polymorphous perversity.”
Just as startling in another manner, the junk sculptures of American artist Steve Oatway project an eerie wax museum presence and address a host of unsettling notions. Oatway’s most obvious statement is a sculpture of a blood-splattered Osama Bin Laden with a toy American fighter plane going through his chest and coming out his back. That the elongated figure of the tall terrorist leader, in his long white gown, calls to mind a tower enhances a kind of kneejerk tit for tat reaction that is undeniably cathartic. However, Oatway’s strange little limbless figures in black clerical garb with babydoll heads and crosses hanging around their necks are more winningly weird and oddly affecting with their insipidly beatific expressions and big blue eyes, simultaneously suggesting the innocence of infants and the cunning sanctimoniousness of pedophile priests.
The Danish painter Bjørn Ericksen has one of the more subtle visual vocabularies in this show, enabling him to conjure up the complexity of human relationships in a semi abstract style that also provides pleasure for its formal and painterly attributes. In the composition he calls “Last Minute/If Adam Hadn’t Eaten the Apple, the Banana, the Peach, or Whatever,” a big blue hand (its underdeveloped thumb suggesting one of the lower primates) reaches down from the sky to snatch a nude female figure resembling a severely simplified Botticelli Venus away from a male in a bright red t-shirt who forces a clown-like smile as he strives in vain to reach out to her. The setting, by the way, is hardly Edenic, suggesting nothing so much as the parkinglot of a strip mall, its bleakness relieved here and there by patches of bright green Astroturf.
In fact, Ericksen’s people appear as though they would be right at home in the deadpan interiors of another semi-abstract Danish painter, Jonna Pedersen, whose composition “Cold Sheets in Berlin” bespeaks the bleakness of an unsuccessful romantic assignation in Heartbreak Hotel with its simplified sink, empty mirror, and snot-green walls. Pedersen melds these unattractive seeming elements into an oddly harmonious and appealing composition by virtue of her unerring sense of the tensions inherent in space, as well as her ability to make essentially drab color combinations resonate emotionally. In this regard she reminds one of the group of British painters known as The Kitchen Sink School, led by John Bratby, who endeavored to capture the grimness of the postwar period. Pedersen, however, transcends proletarian soap opera by virtue of a formal restraint that lends her compositions far more resonance.
Although their names sound vaguely similar, one trusts that you will not get Pedersen mixed up with Valerie Patterson, a consummate realist whose contorted figures invariably appear to writhe within the grip of some translucent mebraneous substance reminiscent of the bloodstreaked primal slime we are all covered with when we’re yanked from the dark comfort of the womb into the harsh fluorescence of this world in the Big Bang of birth. Their faces obfuscated as though by the semi-sheer stockings bank robbers or terrorists sometimes pull over their heads to mask their features, these vulnerable souls appear to be bound and gagged in a manner that can be interpreted symbolically in myriad ways. One thinks of Edvard Munch’s famous work “The Scream,” but in Patterson’s work, rather than radiating out in fiery sound-waves, the cry is inwardly muffled, as though by one of those transparent plastic dry cleaners’ bags that we are forever being warned not to let our small children smother in. Valerie Patterson’s figures appear as though they have crawled into one of those things willingly, mistaking it for the womb they were so rudely expelled from, and are now struggling in vain to be born again.
Richard Milo is another artist who puts an accomplished realist technique, involving the use of an airbrush along with layered glazes applied in the traditional manner, to the service of a singularly subjective vision in his meticulous renderings of symbolic figures and objects melding in allegorical compositions possessed of a classical repose that makes them something of an anomaly among the more funky members of the Monkdogz menagerie. Milo layers his compositions as richly as Sigmar Polke, albeit without resorting to 1980s-style irony; rather he employs images such as ancient Egyptian statues, navigation charts and schooners alluding to Columbus’ journey, simulated tintypes of Indians and calvary officers, a symbolic skull-faced Uncle Sam, and the spacesuits of NASA to create pictures that convey apparently heartfelt sentiments regarding events of personal and historical significance. Although actual figures, such as a cherubic naked child, appear in some paintings, others are comprised of pictures within the picture, statues, and other symbolically juxtaposed inanimate objects, suggesting a contemporary synthesis of surrealism and the trompe l’oeil manner of 19th century still life painters such as John Peto and William Hartnett.
By contrast, the sensual female figure, as mythologized by the modern mass media, occupies center stage in the art of Michael Apice, a professor at Briarcliffe College, who employs a monochromatic palette that lends his paintings and prints an atmosphere reminiscent of film noir. Apice, who has also worked as an illustrator for Paramount Pictures, among other clients, bathes his languorous starlet-types in silvery tones that evoke the sheen of moist skin, silken sheets and the way light gleams off the peroxided hair of the voluptuous femme fatales in 1940s B-movies. Although his use of grisaille in dramatically cropped compositions could signal a stylistic kinship with David Salle, Apice’s approach to womanly curves is romantic rather than pornographic; he is an artist enamored of the Goddess rather than the bimbo.
Although more abstract than most of the other work in this show, the large canvases of Sunia Boneham, which the artist calls “Scaffoldings” and states “are the untangling, reweaving, raw, complexities of experience in New York City” fit auspiciously into the ethos of Monkdogz Urban Art. Like Hundertwasser’s architectural mazes or Jean Dubuffet’s art brut “townscapes,” Boneham’s paintings are composed with convoluted and colorful linear configurations that suggest neon-splashed subway maps. The calligraphic mark-making, enlivened by staccato strokes, splashes, and drips, has a crude energy akin to Basquiat; however, her compositions have a rhythmic grace that belongs to Boneham alone.
Even more unexpected in context, the drawings of Lou Patrou and the paintings and digital prints of the Irish artist Jim Lawn provide a welcome note of lyricism amid all the clamor. Patrou engulfs human and anthropomorphic feline heads ala Saul Steinberg in vigorously applied rainbow hues that charge them with a dazzling visual electricity. Although conceived in pastels on paper, Patrou’s images are reproduced as FujiFlex prints and mounted on wood behind clear plexiglass in a manner that both lends more heft as art objects and slightly “distances” the image, adding to its visionary numinousness.
By contrast, the Irish artist Jim Lawn endeavors to apprehend an elusive subject in his subtle composition “Atlantic Mist,” with its amorphous forms and light akin to Turner’s “tinted steam.” Here, as well as in other paintings, such as “Fruits of Creation,” Lawn’s buoyant visual poetry and chromatic frisson are optically seductive, with soft-focused forms afloat in luminous color fields in compositions invested with expressive depth and mystery. Lawn’s paintings remind one of how evocative and relevant abstract painting can still be when it is concerned with subjective exploration rather than simply achieving a formal effect.
Although too diverse, unruly, and even aesthetically contentious a crew to signify a budding school or movement concepts that seem no longer applicable anyway, given the pluralistic climate of our day the artists assembled under the Monkdogz banner make an auspicious debut and suggest a much needed shot in the arm for postmodern, postmovement art.
Ed McCormack