NYAB Event - “The Fitting Room" Exhibition

“The Fitting Room" Exhibition

Johannes Vogt Gallery

This event has ended.

Vogt Gallery presents a three-person painting show, “The Fitting Room: David Brody, Mernet Larsen, Nicole Wittenberg”.

Guest curator David Cohen comments on the title of his show and the artists he has selected:

The “fitting room” of the title comes from the Haruki Murakami novel, The WindUp Bird Chronicle, which I was reading at the time the line-up of this show came together. I wasn’t trying in any programmatic way to illustrate the novel, but was struck, rather, by many affinities between the Vogt three and this magic-realist novel: a peculiar concentration upon qualities of space; interplay of generation; synchronicities of damage and repair. Larsen, Brody and Wittenberg, like characters in the novel, represent three generations as they are born, respectively, in 1940, 1958 and 1979.

In the novel the fitting room refers to a space created by a mother-son team, business partners of the narrator-hero, who are engaged in psychic healing at the site of a disused well; the room is a close replica of another at premises elsewhere in the city previously used by the mother in her couture days, which had been retained as a place whose business-like surroundings put clients at ease as she practiced her healing techniques. The narrator pondered the decision to clone the room when there was no longer a need for disguise. “Whatever the reason for having it, I myself was pleased with it… It was an unreal setting, but not an unnatural one.”

The phrase “fitting room” resonated with the enticingly cabinet-like Vogt gallery space as a fitting place to juxtapose and study painters. In relation to the painters themselves, “fitting room” is a kind of triple entendre: it suggests a room 2 in which fittings take place, a suitable room, and the activity of finding or inserting room within or into a given area.

From Wittenberg there will be examples from an extensive series of paintings of an interior, a Venetian bedroom that is the kind of luxurious yet functional space that could quite credibly serve an upscale couturier. Her serial approach is to apply, from canvas to canvas, different color schemes, and contrasting balance and painterly touch, while retaining a nearly identical compositional structure, so that in some pieces there is a voluptuous, almost carnal correlation of brushstrokes to bed linens, while in others a chaste flattened schema prevails.

Larsen is also primarily a painter of interiors, or of spaces that force awareness of passage from interiors to exteriors. She pursues radical spatial solutions, eschewing conventional single-point perspective in favor of parallel perspective, reverse perspective and eccentric, seemingly-improvised but rigorously seenthrough fusions of different systems within the same work. The Escher-on-acid effects can be humorous, but the earnest intention in her ongoing theme of committee meetings is to represent a convincing roomful of people in such a way as to prevent the foreground figures blocking any view of those behind them. By destabilizing the location of the viewer, sometimes indeed to the point of inducing vertigo, she forces us to know, rather than merely see, the situation. Her representational practice grew out of abstraction and is pervaded by awareness of Japanese narrative scrolls.

Brody is also a painter seen to be “fitting room” into his dense, complex, evolving-before-our eyes-as-we-watch pictorial space. In his case, it is sometimes as if rooms are literally slotted into holes or lesions within his vast confabulations of urban structure. His imagery teases contrastive associations in which opposite extremes of scale seem possible: we might be looking at a dense cellular structure, a rusty machine, or the panorama of a futuristic but at the same time decaying city. He generates intense painterly webs of involved, accumulating marks that have the energy of algorithmic patterns and yet are entirely intuitive and improvisatory.

All three painters play off artifice against naturalness in their work. They subscribe to rules of their own making, conjuring worlds of mystery without giving in to gratuitous or arbitrary formal solutions. Brody’s highly wrought imagery epitomizes the notion of purposiveness without purpose; Larsen imbues ludic situations with tenderness and unexpected humanity; and Wittenberg taps a contemporary collision of remoteness and real-time presence in her poignant Skype portraits painted during online video conversations.

[Image: Nicole Wittenberg "Untitled" (2010) Oil on canvas, 25 x 42 in.]