Whose Muse?

May 07, 2024

As a young gallerist, Paul Henkel has the personality of an old-timey collector, interested in identifying talents lurking within his immediate circle and building intimate and collaborative relationships with those he acts as a patron of. Those familiar with Paul’s style would soon realize how much of a traditional dealer he is. Paul’s connoisseur approach, rooted in the vast knowledge of classical painting traditions he possesses, results in a program sensitive to this age-old medium’s historical specificity and discursive contexts, boasting a roster from Natalie Frank to David Smalling.

The architectural layout and design of Palo Gallery, Paul’s brainchild, tucked away on the quiet Bond Street, feels like an intimate salon of the Parisian avant-garde. Indeed, residents of artists’ lofts and studios in East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood, many of whom are producing exciting works for tomorrow’s frontier, regularly congregate at Palo Gallery and go all out for openings, often leading to block parties. Some of these artists would go on to work with Paul closely.

By Qingyuan Deng
Image courtesy of Palo Gallery. Photography by Lily Burgess

Recently, Paul curated a show, Whose Muse?, at Palo Gallery. Expansively and liberally installed, Whose Muse? demonstrates a boundless curiosity for the contemporary contour of portraiture painting and its limit. Problematizing the assumed parameters of muse as a passive recipient, Paul’s curatorial maneuver focuses on how the status of muse is granted but never a given. In line with his commitment to emerging talents, Paul highlights rising stars in the exhibition, who also happen to have posited some of the most enigmatic and provocative thesis on the absence and presence of muse in the contemporary landscape of portraiture painting.

(left) Lorenzo Amos, Girl with pink hair / Analiese, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

(right) Ronan Day-Lewis, The Space Between Us, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

For example, Lorenzo Amos’ Girl with pink hair / Analiese hides his painterly gaze in the abundance of gestures and impressions. Alternatively, Ronan Day-Lewis designates archives of images floating on the Internet as his source of inspiration, in the case of The Space Between Us. Asher Liftin’s Miles Reading takes the digital impulse to explosive ends, bracketing otherwise unseen pixels as units of perception. Elsewhere, Charlie Gosling’s self-study series outright denies viewers access to the artist’s face, the locus of recognition and identification. A similar act can be seen in Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s Untitled (melting woman). The muse (or a fleeting image of the artist) seemingly disappears.

(left) Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Untitled (melting woman), 2023. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

(right) Asher Liftin, Miles Resting, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

This exhibition is called Whose Muse? and most artists in the show seem to be troubling this historically problematic notion of the muse. Shall we start with your curatorial strategy responding to the question of muse?

This whole conversation started because we wanted to do a show on portraiture. I found that there is a small group of very brilliant artists, loosely inspired by British academic painting, who are working in a very real portrait mode of paintings. Quickly, when it comes to showing portraiture, the inevitable question is who is being depicted and what’s the relationship? My curatorial strategy toys with the historical idea of muse, and the difference between the muse and portraiture subject, the latter often appearing in paintings commissioned by powerful figures in an official capacity.

My research discovers that contemporary women artists are not only painting a great deal of self-portraiture that deviates from the historically troubled muse but also intimate familial relations that are more balanced in terms of power dynamics. Ultimately, I am interested in complicating the trope of male artist and their muse. Through proper research, it is much more apparent that Kiki Montparnasse or Elizabeth Siddal, who have unfair reputations for being poor, helpless women, were brilliant artists in their own right. Siddal had just as much influence on the pre-Raphaelites as anyone in their circle. To me, the muse as a participatory subject in the creation of the work becomes a running thread. The question mark in the exhibition title is to look at the breadth and complexity of these relationships, especially in the 21st century, where we have artists who are working without an actual model. Ronan Day-Lewis just grabbed an image of one of these weird images people post on Flickr for his painting. It was a picture from someone’s digital camera from the 2000s. He cropped and painted it into an incredible portrait in the sepia tone. Ronan will never meet them and has no relationship with them, he’s just fascinated by the mystery of their lives.

I am glad you mentioned the role of digital technology. As I understand it, there are quite a few artists in the show who are responding to how technology complicates this more expensive reading of muse-artist relationship. Could you talk more about those artists a bit more?

We live in a world where we are inundated with the idea of a portrait, right? We can take hundreds of portraits a day on our phones, but it is not the same as a true relationship to or study of a human. In most cases, the traditional portraiture is just as much a painting of the artist as that of the sitter. In spite of sounding arrogant, I wanted to put together an exhibition that encourages looking at images and depictions of other people again. Asher Liftin made two portraits for the show. One of them was based on an iPhone picture of his friend Miles, taken when they were visiting the last Venice Biennale. Asher broke the photo up into pixelated four colorway practice, which becomes a fascinating interplay between digital pixels and printed inks.

David Smalling’s painting is not of anyone, it is a surrealist contortion of a figure in marble. He has gone completely meta with it, using Photoshop to make almost a fetishization of the idea of a traditional, erotic muse such as Venus de Milo.

At the same time, I am balancing that with people who completely reject the technological side of things. Phoebe Helander only works with live models. Esme Hodsoll just told us she needs another three months of sitting!

Lorenzo Amos is in the middle. He would say his biggest inspiration are Mapplethorpe, Freud, Menzel, and Goya. Lorenzo sits with his models for hours, gets them to close and sit and frame up. But he takes photos of them with his iPhone, and that is his reference images to turn into these very painterly paintings.

I’m also thinking about artists using projectors to project images on a canvas. When you put them next to Lucien Freud, which is probably the other end of the spectrum, a very slow considered study, tensions rise.

(left) Phoebe Helander, Orange Eyeshadow, 2022. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

(right) Esme Hodsoll, Boy In Bed, 2016. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

You mentioned Freud. There’s a whole group of artists in the show hadn’t been thinking about technology, just because they were making works at a different time. I’m interested in the intergenerational lineup that you’re opting for here. Is this a historical survey? Or are you trying to establish interplays and tensions between the historical and contemporaneous.

I would love to do a historical survey of portraiture, but I don’t think we have the access or the wall space to go as far back as I would like to go. However, you can’t look at the state of new academic painters, like Lorenzo Amos or Sergey Kononov without considering Freud because he is certainly one of the most important post-war artists working with the idea of muse. Freud also had quite a reputation for being rather horrible to his subject. Nicola Bowery and Sue Tilley have both written books about their complicated relationships with Freud. But he is the ‘father’ of many of these painters working today and having this exhibition without his work felt some somewhat off.

I also selected a George Grosz drawing Artist and Model in the Dunes, which is a very sexualized study he did in the dunes in North Germany. It’s very cheeky, as Grosz was always slightly tongue in cheek, and still felt very relevant to the context of portraiture. Having a few artists who represent more of the history, even if it's the last 100 or so years was very important to look at this larger picture of portraiture.

George Grosz, Artist and Model in the Dunes (1940). Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

I’m also curious as to, now that you have completed curating the show, what are some of the insights you wish for people to take home?

When I go to the Met, or a lot of other museums, I have noticed that aside from the really, famous ones, like Mona Lisa, a lot of people move past portraits. It is less interesting than a grand landscape or history painting to many people. To me, portraitures often the most interesting. Because of this technical technological profusion that replaces portraits with images of people, we have lost touch with looking at considered portraiture. The show is an attempt to encourage considered looking and think through what representing a person really means. As a story or a vessel, a portraiture is always a complex network of contradictions, intricacies and tensions. Most importantly, I want people to physically be at the gallery to look at these portraits that fill our walls. Even right now, as I start looking at works together, and seeing connections that I hadn’t considered before, my perspective is constantly being slightly shifted. As much as we can put things together as a PDF, it is never the same as having them in the same space.

It seems that your curatorial strategy here goes beyond identifying different modalities of contemporary portraiture, be it seated, observed, or self-portraits, and really fleshing out the more intellectual and aesthetic implications of creating portraitures in the age of device saturation.

I started with the idea of putting portraits into three categories because we have these three rooms. I have left that idea behind because I thought it was too reductive. A portrait of a model can be just as much an act of self-portraiture as a physical self-portrait, and a self-portrait can be just as distant as copying a found image into a painting to me. I want to be unconstrained in my curation here and explore these more intricate, sensitive relationships when it comes to technology, subject, and agency. It is more exciting and a lot harder to put together a show that avoids using easy marks, but I think it’s going to turn out to be a very interesting conversation.

Whose Muse? is on view at Palo Gallery, 30 Bond St. New York, NY 10012 until June 1, 2024.

Art

Barbara Nitke's 'American Ecstasy'

Throughout the show’s three month run, Nitke, who now teaches at SVA and works as a mainstream film photographer, has hosted several talks. On March 30, she and porn expert Casey Scott played clips from hardcore films that appear in American Ecstasy like Sexcapades (1983) and Viva Vanessa (1984), all by legend Henri Pachard. Nitke was his go-to photographer.

She entered the industry in 1982 through her husband, a financier who helped make The Devil In Miss Jones (1973). In 1982, Nitke started off as an on-set photographer working on Part Two. “I realized early on that I had access to this world, and I could do a documentary,” Nitke told me. “I saw it as an art project.” She struck a deal that she could pull slides, and did interviews on set.

“I did have a theory back then, that if you were going to do sex work, especially in front of a camera, you probably had a trauma in your life,” Nitke said, “which I totally disproved to myself.”

Every photo in American Ecstasy tells many tales, beginning in the stars they depict. One of the most striking shots in the show centers on Stacey Donovan, still fresh from Seventeen, riding her seated co-star reverse — her body poised mid-air precariously over his visibly glistening head. Donovan’s dirty blonde fringe obscures her downcast eyes, and the hands on her hips read defiant. “What I found interesting about her is she did not like sex,” Nitke remarked.

In White Women (1986), though — as we saw the night Nitke and Scott offered everyone an authentic porn dinner of soggy baked ziti — Donovan uses poppers to seduce a lovesick rockstar into fucking. She fakes an orgasm as he finishes, and when he promptly leaves, she desperately gets herself off. Nitke considers it a classic Pachard touch. She calls him “a sensitive guy who was also a shithead,” as well as a director who sought to portray female desire and experience.

Although porn migrated to meet LA’s pretty young starlets in the mid-80s, Pachard preferred seasoned performers like Sharon Mitchell and Vanessa Del Rio, both in American Ecstasy. One photo from Nasty Girls (1983) captures Mitchell before a moment of immense professionalism, where she improvisationally licked fluids from her necklace because her co-star accidentally busted outside of her mouth. Del Rio, seen flexing on stage, knew and demanded her worth.

These were hour-long films that fans had to leave home to buy. Although the plots that connected their sex scenes were flimsy, Nitke believes that if porn had been allowed to grow, it may have become an artform, like horror did. Instead, she witnessed prosecution from numerous angles — feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who saw porn as objectification and violence, alongside Jerry Falwell’s moral majority, who pushed the Reagan administration to pursue aggressive new venue shopping tactics while sticking obscenity suits on porn producers.

But, try as Mike Johnson’s “Covenant Eyes” might, vices prevail. For most who aren’t asexual or otherwise celibate, arousal is on the hierarchy of needs. And, like the rest of culture, the internet tessellated porn into infinite online niches. Some are exploratory and healthy, yet the wider machine says porn is giving teens hardcore tastes and dysmorphia. No wonder they’re not having sex. In a final blow of poetic justice, abstinence-only education IRL just makes porn more powerful.

Not that adults who had first kisses before Pornhub are much better off. I suffered when my middle school boyfriend called Megan Fox hot growing up, so the lover I brought to Nitke’s talk felt my hands sweat in his. Another colleague I ran into there walked out before it was over. We crossed paths again at a birthday party that night and discussed our various discomforts. In a world saturated with viscerally violent imagery, it’s fascinating that porn can still make people squirm. Nitke herself went through four literary agents and the illustrious editor Judith Reagan before self-publishing American Ecstasy in 2012 to avoid censoring its central hardcore stars.

As an exhibition, American Ecstasy encapsulates the fuzzy glamor of porn’s halcyon days. It can even get guests to check their baggage at the door by arresting them with the alluring abandon of a fledgling genre playing with the archetypal elements of sex, beauty and power, uninhibited.

Art

Unrequited at 59 Wooster Street

May 15, 2024

I walk past the posing mannequins dressed up in sequins and micro shorts at the Gucci flagship and dial all the buttons available. Not sure which floor to press, all I know is that I’m at 59 Wooster Street, birthplace to decades of extraordinary prints. It’s the address where art dealers Brooke and Carolyn Alexander established their gallery, bringing the peak of post-war print revolution and altering the evolving practice of art.

The door opens and I step inside, probably the very same worn-out bunker that once propelled the likes of Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, and Richard Tuttle to elevate their legacies. I'm greeted by Pietro Alexander, nephew of Brooke Alexander and founder of SPY Projects, claiming this as its temporary New York space and Sara Apple, curator of its first exhibition, a show that puts its own noble spin on the heritage of the house by disregarding just that.

Words by Vilda Krog

The Alexander Gallery is haunted by phantoms of the past. I imagine curating a show in a space like this is equivalent to checking in at the Chelsea Hotel, hosting a party at CBGD (impossible, thank you wholesale), or ordering the bacon burger at JG Melon. It’s a New York time capsule, nostalgically self-indulgent, and rightly so.

When you inherit a legacy like this, it's easy to fall into the trap of repetition. At times, this repetition is driven by pressure, a sense or honor, or frankly, fear. There's an anxiety about living up to whatever was achieved before you arrived — the feeling of stepping into shoes that are too big to fill but wearing them anyway. They might guide you down the same path, but that's precisely the issue. It takes more than just a hint of confidence (or naivete) to break free from this cycle.

Chris Lloyd, I Shall Cut Off My Eyelids To See Better, 2024.

Cristine Brache, Blue Mood, 2024.

“You’ve got to have a serious ego problem to own a gallery,” quips Alexander, presenting me with an unfiltered glimpse into his self-perception as a tastemaker. This prompts the question: do all artists share this trait? Beneath the imposter syndrome prevalent in many creatives lies a fundamental desire to be recognized, seen. Is this egoism, or perhaps a survival instinct?

The outcome of ego isn't what justifies Spy Projects’ arrival in New York. While it may be tempting to attribute it solely to Brooke Alexander being Pietro Alexander’s uncle, the truth is more nuanced. The exhibition stands independently, free from the weight of legacy or family ties. With almost effortless grace, the space's rich history now showcases both established and emerging artists, creatives united by a shared urge — a 'need,' as Apple describes it — to harness the remnants of New York’s post-industrial landscape, not just in their art, but in their very way of life.

Raymond Pettibon, Untitled (Hitchcock’s “the birds”…), 2024. Untitled (Shall I consider…), 2024.

Katherine Auchterlonie, Feuillet-Beauchamp Notation of a Good Make-Out Session, 2023.

Kay Kasparhauser, Blood, 2024.

It feels like a family affair. The curation doesn't try to impose a grand narrative by forcing artworks under an artificial title, a futile attempt to unify disparate artists. Unrequited is as enigmatic as it is purposeful — a title as blank as the gallery's walls, allowing for continual exploration. Each work stands distinct yet interconnected, except for instances where an artist submitted duplicates, strategically placed apart to evoke a thought-provoking contrast.

Textile collages by Alison Peery converse with Peter Alexander’s transition to velvet in 1984; Montana Simone’s pieces assert dominance not only in size but also through their assertive use of steel. Kay Kasparhauser’s medium evokes elements of hair, moss, and what the artist calls “Kay’s blood.” Malik Al Maliki’s outlandish treatment of woodblocks tempers the intensity within Raymond Pettibon’s expressive acrylics, while within Sasha Filimonov’s panel — reminiscent of Eastern European propaganda — the artist has incorporated a portable gun, which, when activated, is almost as arresting as the female figures concealed behind thick layers of wax in Cristine Brache’s works, blurring the line between dehumanization and a dream state.

Cristine Brache, Purple Bunnies, 2024.

Montana Simone, Choke Collar, 2024.

Sasha Filimonov, nightlight, 2024.

Unrequited is akin to being at a library but only reading a single page in each book, or scrolling through Netflix but only watching trailers. It's like waking up hungover at a brunch-buffet on a Sunday morning, finding yourself faced with croissants, bacon, ham, sausages, eggs, pancakes, bagels, cream cheese, avocados, bananas, blueberries, yogurt, etc, etc. But does it satisfy or does it leave you feeling overwhelmed and nauseous? A group show always presents a delicate balance.

Spy Project’s New York debut is not an imitation like the posturing mannequins at the adjacent flagship store, nor is it an attempt to mimic the legacy in which it finds itself ensconced. Rather, it offers a genuine experience devoid of pretense. Unrequited sits you down for family dinner, where conversations traverse generations, opinions vary, and no one hesitates to voice their views.

Before I left the gallery on Wednesday afternoon, Apple opened the window to invite neighbors smoking on the fire escape across the street to the opening the following evening. Despite seeming to have absolutely nothing in common, there they were, finding a connection.

Photography by Daniel Arnold

Spy Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles founded by Pietro Alexander in 2021, is temporarily visiting New York. The exhibition, Unrequited, will be on view until May 31st, 2024, at 59 Wooster Street.

Art

Wishing Well

Gal Schindler, Wishing Well, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Raised on the work of de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Milton Avery, Schindler’s work exudes a sense of fluidity and ambiguity. Further citing influences ranging from old-style Disney characters and antique botanical wallpaper, the artist combines a charming illustrative style with gestural strokes and a unique scratching technique to depict figures reclining languidly leaning in and against their pastel backdrops, merging into one indecipherable composition.

Gal Schindler, Fire Fountain, In the Meantime, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

At the heart of Schindler's practice lies an exploration of the human form. Her nudes serve as conduits for a multitude of emotions, embodying the fragility and mutability of the human, and particularly female, experience. Further drawing on influences from her childhood, the artist references intricately depicted anatomical drawings, her loose figures and strokes blurring the boundaries between flesh and canvas.

Undoubtedly spring-like in their palette, Schindler’s works are both optimistic and uplifting, with the artist referencing themes of renewal, regeneration and growth in her playful alternatives to traditional nudes depicted under a male gaze. There’s a sense of performativity, appealing to both a female and a younger gaze by creating fluid figures that defy categorization. Schindler’s paintings are sweet without being saccharine and sensual without being overtly sexual, instead, they occupy a liminal space between categories, appealing to anyone who may be a little ground down by moody palettes and sterile compositions. The transitory nature of Schindler’s composition speaks to the flux of the human form and an inability to contain and categorize the human form.

Gal Schindler, Live the Questions Now, Paint the Rain, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Gal Schindler, Crystal Clear, A Promise, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Wishing Well is a playful collection of fairy-tale figures that lean between sensual characters and traditional forms, with the transitory nature of the compositions creating a sense of impermanence that comes from the artist's unique technique of scratching into wet paint to create transitory forms. Schindler's works occupy a realm between landscape and figuration, where bodies float in a nebulous non-space. Beginning with instinctual colour planes, the artist overlays rapid structural lines, leaving behind traces of gesture and memory. The resulting figures blend seamlessly with their visual surroundings, their forms emerging from the depths of the canvas like reflections on still water, calling to mind the “Wishing Well’ in question. Life ripples on still water, Schindler’s figures remain distorted and alluring, half-emerging and half-hidden, they occupy somewhere between imagination and reality.

Wishing Well is on view at Ginny on Frederick, 99 Charterhouse St, Barbican, London EC1M 6HR, United Kingdom until May 24th, 2024.

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