Michelle Segre
Through Jan. 7. Derek Eller, 300 Broome Street, Manhattan; 212-206-6411, derekeller.com.
Drawing, design and decay are all alluded to or implicated in “Dawn of the Looney Tune,” Michelle Segre’s terrific exhibition of sculptures at Derek Eller. Made with metal armatures, colored yarn, plaster and paint, Ms. Segre’s sculptures initially look two-dimensional, like see-through drawings installed in the open gallery space. They conjure the tradition of spirit objects, from dream catchers to shaman sticks, but also Modernist sculpture by Alexander Calder, Julio González, Isamu Noguchi and David Smith, as well as the surrealism of Alberto Giacometti, with its odd angles and dangling appendages.
Titles here extend the show’s trippy, surrealist or “looney tune” elements. “Voidsorption” (2017) sounds like a new millennial paper towel brand, while “Clown Clutter” (2017), a riot of primary colors, conjures Calder’s “Circus” (1927), as well as the creepier aspects of clown culture.
The gutsiest and most inspiring part of the show involves decay. “Driftloaf Totem (Red & White)” (2017) includes pieces of foam that suggest the formless gyres of detritus floating around in our oceans — but the sculpture also includes bread. This theme continues in “Degenerate Pet” (2017) and “Pet of a New Order” (2017), in which loaves of molding bread sit on Day-Glo-colored pebbles inside glass terrariums.
How, you might ask, is that going to exist as a sculpture beyond next week? Ms. Segre suggests that creatively, from Leonardo da Vinci’s crumbling (during his lifetime) “Last Supper” (1494-98) to process and performance art in the 1960s, this is a boring question — or, at least, less interesting than investigating art’s experimental aspects and witnessing degeneration and decay in the moment — which, as the Buddhists remind us, is all we have anyway.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Elizabeth Murray
Through Jan. 13. Pace, 510 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-255-4044, pacegallery.com.
Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) called the elaborately shaped, exuberantly colored canvases she began making in the 1980s paintings, and the astonishing thing is that she was right. The 16 examples up now at Pace include “Like a Leaf,” a flying concatenation of green and blue angles comprising six separate stretchers; “Making It Up,” a 10-foot-high shape with curling corners, like a psychedelic bedsheet that’s slipped its clothesline to fly into the sky; and “Stay Awake,” a kind of rounded red drinking horn or cartoon heart that extends almost two feet from the wall. But, in all of them, she manages to maintain the self-contained self-evidence and untethered potential of more ordinary flat rectangles.
Continue reading the main storySometimes she does this with theatrical tricks of perspective. The apparently bulbous form of “Stay Awake,” on closer inspection, is quite compressed, as are the little squares and diamonds projecting from its surface. More often, though, Murray is playing the formal details of her images against corresponding choices in texture or armature to knit pictorial and physical depth into a single imaginative arena. At the top of “Like a Leaf,” two rectangles overlap — one in two dimensions and the other in three — while the reticulated red rhomboids that decorate “Making It Up,” get smaller and smaller until they finally burst into a ridgy impasto. The result is a thrilling hypertext rooted equally in the world and in the mind.
WILL HEINRICH
Sally Webster
Through Jan. 7. 33 Orchard, 33B Orchard Street, Manhattan; 347-278-1500, 33orchard.com.
In the 1970s and early ’80s, Sally Webster was a member of the San Francisco new wave and punk band the Mutants. Her current show of paintings, “Daydream Believer,” at 33 Orchard, echoes this musical past. The title of the show harks back to the ’60s hit song recorded by the Monkees and written by John Stewart, a former member of the Kingston Trio. The paintings themselves are bright, psychedelic and sexy. Most are square and just a bit larger than a 12-inch LP vinyl record cover.
The subjects and contents of the paintings would also make good record covers. “Medusa” (2017) includes a spiky mass of acid yellow-green squiggles shaped into a vague wig shape (also reminiscent of a Dale Chihuly sculpture), laid out over a pattern of small triangles of primary and secondary colors. “Fright Wig” (2016) and “Wigzag” (2014) also feature psychedelic hairdos with no heads to support them.
A pair of bare human feet hover over an eye-tickling wavy pattern in pungent fuchsia, while a whale blowing out water (which also suggests human ejaculation) contrasts with a background of blue and white sine waves. “Willin’” (2017) has two red silhouettes of curvy women sitting back-to-back, reminiscent of a popular car decal. Nestled in the concentric red, green and yellow patterns of this painting are tiny whirling planets and images of human couples copulating.
Ms. Webster’s paintings are a lot of fun. Like pop songs, they may not be the heaviest on substance or the likeliest to survive the rigors of long-term art history. But like psychedelic drugs or daydreams, they are potent, arresting and capable of momentarily altering your perception. And like a goofily infectious Monkees song, they will almost certainly make you smile.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
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