Bodies are everywhere, both in galleries and on their walls, during spring's transition to summer. But as a subject for the art on view now, the bodily relates more often, it seems, to alienation than to sexiness. In the best work, there’s a corporeal searching—a longing—for connection, an exploration of whether or not it is possible to know another.
To understand the present, we must first understand the past—such logic informs the historicizing impulse behind a show like David Zwirner’s “Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York.” It’s a fascinating mixed bag of works that still feels fresh 30 years on. Well, mostly. A room of paintings by John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage—with the apparent theme of boobs—feels stale and dated as a pairing (hint: it’s Currin’s work that isn’t aging well). More interesting is the conversation between Marlene Dumas with Luc Tuymans in the next gallery. Two lesser Dumas paintings—one of a pregnant woman, the other of two children wading in water—typify her compositional mode, but not her usual power. However, the South African artist’s expressive gifts, such as her paint-into-paint rendering of pairs of held hands, are on full view, in the less typical composition The Visitor, 1995—a scene of five young woman in a dark interior (a nightclub?), turned away from the viewer, looking back through an open door in the distance. In sharp contrast, Tuymans's Jesus (Christ, 1998) looks like a U.S. federal law enforcement agent trying to blend in while boarding a flight. And why not?
The best Tuymans work here isn’t of a figure; it’s of a flower, Orchid, 1998. In fact, the best paintings in the show aren’t of figures at all. Untitled, 1997, by Laura Owens, depicts a museum or gallery interior, and Peter Doig’s Briey (Concrete Cabin), 1994-96, is a view of a Modernist building through a stand of trees. His transcendent Jetty, 1994, does feature a figure—if only a tiny one—at the center of the picture’s sprawling landscape, an update of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, 1808-10, recently shown at the Met. The real organizing theme of the show seems to be: big names, circa 1995, that still command steep prices.
