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Lisa Yuskavage, Neo Rauch and Michaël Borremans: Taking Painting’s Temperature

There were only two days during which David Zwirner’s Lisa Yuskavage show, which closed November 5, ran alongside its current Neo Rauch and Michaël Borremans shows, which opened November 4. During that time, I had some out-of-town guests, and the advice was simple: if you like oil painting, go to Zwirner. Indeed, Yuskavage, Rauch and Borremans are three of the best artists working in the medium today, and while they are radically different from each other in approach and aesthetic, they are all devoted to exploring the relevance of figure and landscape in contemporary painting.

The artists’ various philosophies might be explained Goldilocks-style: one is too hot; one is too cold; and one is just right. It’s not hard to guess which is which. The hot Yuskavage is, famously, a peer of John Currin’s, and treads similar territories of desire and consumption. Her rounded, fecund female figures are knowing references to the swelled wombs of Netherlandish Eves, and to the mawkish profiles of devotional Precious Moments characters. There’s no mistaking what she’s after: a deconstruction of the sexualized girlishness that has become so commonplace to contemporary depictions of femininity. If that point bludgeons a bit, Yuskavage’s settings, virtuosic exercises in colour and form, temper it with mystery. And her newest paintings, notably the highlight of this exhibition—a grand mountainscape triptych depicting a woman on a wooden table, supine with legs splayed, as if waiting to be sacrificed and/or raped by an encroaching clan of bonneted, long-skirted women—verge on profundity, their shimmering technical acumen belying their outward adherence to kitsch.

Lisa Yuskavage Triptych 2010–1 Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner New York

Rauch, the cold one, and a fairly extreme antidote to Yuskavage, is at once less fussy and more cerebral. He is the elder statesman of the Leipzig school of painters that emerged from East Germany after the fall of the wall; nonetheless, there is something of the prodigy about him. Much has been made of the cryptic content of his work—Is he taking on the socialist-realist iconography of the former Soviet Europe?—but this tack seems a losing battle, for he is foremost an architect of painting: a painter’s painter, if you will. Rauch’s art-historical precedents are, indeed, less human than Yuskavage’s. In his work, one sees a lineage stemming at least as far back as Giorgione, where figure and landscape are juxtaposed with each other, either in complement or contrast, in an exercise in perspective and, in turn, the alchemy of looking. A more recent analogue identified by writers on Rauch is Max Ernst, a talented surrealist whose hallucinations cannot easily be unravelled, and likely aren’t meant to be.

Neo Rauch Das Kreisen 2011 Courtesy David Zwirner New York and Eigen + Art Berlin/Leipzig

Rauch’s newest suite of paintings is impressive, but by no means a fresh start. There are the customary askew pastorals done with incredible flair, with popping floral colours and vaguely medievalist costumes. (This exhibition, so pagan and, often, spring-like, might have been called “Rite.”) The interiors seem, again not unlike previous works, to be in the tradition of artists’ studio paintings, most evidently Das Kreisen, with its central life model curtsying in a blue dress above a fallen Carravaggio-esque angel. The dramatic Aprilnacht, a weird couple tableau in which the man and woman both hold owls (and the tree limbs above seem to spell out some ineffable message) is probably the centrepiece, as the woman is seen again in the show as a falconer in a Rauchian anomaly, a life-sized bronze sculpture. The sculpture is a foray rather than a new direction, however. Ditto for his small works, such as the sea-green Die Warte. Ware, a large drawing-room scene of figures peering into artworks by lamplight, seems a breathtaking encapsulation of the Rauchian vision. Figures turn towards the aesthetic, historic and idiosyncratic with rapt, nearly inhuman attention, with no heed to who might be looking on.

Neo Rauch Ware 2011 Courtesy David Zwirner New York and Eigen + Art Berlin/Leipzig

None of the figures in Michaël Borremans’ exhibition, “The Devil’s Dress,” looks at the viewer, although the world they inhabit seems somehow more open. One easily slaps the label of “narrative” on certain contemporary painters, though it is often difficult to parse such a designation. Borremans’ work, full of sensitivity to the psychology of the face and body, tells multiple stories, however undefined. In “The Devil’s Dress,” characters—painted gorgeously, with colours mixed and applied so gracefully as to suggest an almost religious appreciation of the frailty of human flesh—are in a kind of trance. The scenes are equally perverse and transcendent. The eponymous works (there are two), as well as The Hovering Wood seem to tell a tale of small-village superstition (one thinks inevitably of the work of Scandinavian filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dryer), where the body is paired with an object in order to effect some kind of spiritual synergy. This is, then, like Rauch, painting about painting. But for Rauch, painting is pictorial, a vehicle to considerations of perspective and myth; for Borremans, it comes from within, like an organ, or an oath.

Michaël Borremans The Loan 2011 Courtesy David Zwirner New York and Zeno X Gallery Antwerp

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