Jacques Monory
Through Feb. 23. Richard Taittinger Gallery, 154 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; 212-634-7154, richardtaittinger.com.
Jacques Monory, well known as a painter and filmmaker in his native France, is having his first solo show in the United States at the age of 93. Fittingly, the exhibition at Richard Taittinger surveys Mr. Monory’s paintings from the past four decades, highlighting his engagement with photography, popular culture and the monochrome.
Mr. Monory was part of a ’60s movement called Narrative Figuration that struggled to distinguish itself from both American Pop Art and earlier French artists. Yet you can see these influences (that of movies, in particular) in Mr. Monory’s Pop subject matter and signature blue palette, which harks back to monochrome specialists like Yves Klein, famous for his International Klein Blue.
The importance of photography is evident in paintings like “Béatrice et Juliette n°1” (1972), which looks like a hipper (and bluer) version of a Gerhard Richter canvas, with its right panel smeared into indistinguishable blurriness. “Death Valley n°4” (1975) reflects an interest in American subjects (especially film noir), but also the death drive of planned-obsolescence consumer culture.
Mr. Monory’s canvases can be easily compared to the work of ’80s American postmodern painters like David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch and Eric Fischl, but he has a soft spot for older figurative artists, too, like Edward Hopper. “Spéciale n°54 Hommage à Hopper” (2007) features a house with a nearby road sign for the Hopper Center — although no such institution exists, except in this painting, which functions, as does most of Mr. Monory’s work, like a movie screen where fantastical drama and action are routinely played out.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Catherine Murphy
Through Feb. 24. Peter Freeman Inc., 140 Grand Street, Manhattan; 212-966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com.
Quietly, one American painter — unconcerned with trends, unhurried by the market — has created an oeuvre of such phenomenological sophistication that she deserves to be called a master. Her art can be found in the collections of the Met, MoMA, the Whitney and more than two dozen other major museums (though too rarely displayed); her students, including Ellen Altfest and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, have risen to prominence (though their teacher’s influence is subtle); and she just keeps at it. She is Catherine Murphy, and her first show of paintings in five years reaffirms that no one sees with a keener eye.
Working without a camera, Ms. Murphy paints expressly choreographed still lifes and landscapes, and her paintings appear as both windows on the world and bluntly flat physical surfaces. In “Becalmed” (2017), a persimmon-colored inner tube floats in a lake, and both the toy and the water reflect nearby foliage: In the plastic doughnut, reeds appear as ghostly spindles, while the surface of the lake is splotched with upside-down pine branches. In the intricate “Flat Screen” (2016), we see a blotchy, impressionistic forest on a lovingly rendered Samsung television; the green and yellow TV leaves echo the wallpaper of the background at left, while the brown of the TV tree trunks is echoed in the burled wood planks on the wall to the right. Both these paintings get their force from the counterbalancing of reality and reflection, image and object, canvas and screen — and, more than their narrative overtones, it’s their perceptual complexity that makes the greatest impact. Her closest contemporary may be Vija Celmins, another meticulous observer, though Ms. Murphy differs in her use of extreme perspectives and her prepainting scenography.
Though Ms. Murphy had an exhibition at North Carolina’s Weatherspoon Art Museum in 2012, a full-dress museum retrospective has so far eluded her. Sometimes I want to scream at curators: An heir to Manet is here among us! But Catherine Murphy knows that there are as many virtues in discretion as in fame.
JASON FARAGO
Sondra Perry
Through Feb. 25. Bridget Donahue, 99 Bowery, second floor, Manhattan; 646-896-1368, bridgetdonahue.nyc.
Structures of exploitation so ubiquitous as to be effectively invisible are only the beginning in Sondra Perry’s latest video. Called “IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection,” it’s a brilliant bricolage of sci-fi meditations on identity, intellectual property and the digital revolution.
It opens with a 3-D rendering of a monumental statue rotating over a montage of blurry photos. The statue is Hoa Hakananai’a, an Easter Island moai looted by the crew of the H.M.S. Topaze in 1868 and presented to Queen Victoria, who presented it in turn to the British Museum. The rendering is in chroma-key blue — an ecstatic, outer-space tone that serves the same function of controlled erasure in postproduction as green-screen green. The photos are childhood snapshots of Ms. Perry and her twin brother, Sandy, who was one of the N.C.A.A. basketball players whose likenesses were pirated, just a few years ago, by the video game company E.A. Sports. The soundtrack is a slowed-down version of the Stylistics’ 1971 soul track “You Are Everything.”
From there, the video careens through news footage, interviews, the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, an actor imitating a synthesized voice and too many other arenas, both real and virtual, to mention. But what ties it all together is a few candid seconds of the artist’s own face, alternately gazing into and ignoring the camera as she tries to capture the evasive reality of what it means to be human now, using herself in all her particularity as an example.
WILL HEINRICH