A darling of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the subject of recent high-profile financial wrangling, and a MacArthur Foundation grant recipient, Mehretu is a virtuoso whose breathless graphic maelstroms, punctuated by splotches of bright color, effectively illustrate Sussman’s notion of a neoabstract “invented world.” Arguably the show’s magnum opus, Seven Acts of Mercy, 2004, is an epic ink-and-synthetic polymer painting that conjures Leonardo’s deluge drawings or quattrocento cartography reinvented for the digital age.
Sussman’s vision of an abstraction that functions as “an amalgam of the real in the imaginary and the imaginary in the real” also finds support in the canvases of Matthew Ritchie, attempted analogues to mythology, religion, mathematics, and the structure of the universe. Only The Eighth Sea, 2002, which depicts a mass of octopus-like forms swimming in a light blue field, is a naturalist departure from his systematizing works of the mid-’90s. And while it may not, strictly speaking, construct an “invented world,” it at least employs “spiral composition.” Also consistent with the idea of a formal aesthetic laced with cosmic or apocalyptic references are the depictions of industrial plants in Franz Ackermann’s acid-bright “mental maps,” the images of helicopters that flit across Steve DiBenedetto’s painterly encrusted surfaces, and the spacey doodles that punctuate Ati Maier’s dense, quasi-naive compositions.
Yet despite these visual and thematic commonalities, the experience of encountering swirling, curvilinear motifs in every room of the show—albeit through the filter of individual “style”—diminished rather than heightened the freshness of many of the paintings. The recurring spiral compositions, gestural speed, and amped-up color quickly started to feel like empty devices or collective visual tics.
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