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what's a world without enigma
@post__times

NY photo dump.
“I live of art and I feel deeply, so we will often be going from black to white. We’ll see all colors. Can you paint? Can you cry?”

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$Margaret Curtis gained prominence in Marcia Tucker’s “Bad Girls” exhibition at the New Museum in 1994 and had three subsequent solo shows at PPOW, the last one in 2003. Since then, her career has occurred outside NYC. Small galleries have been attempting to fill a void lately. Curtis’s extraordinary new exhibition “’S” at Post Times on Henry Street, her first solo exhibition in NYC in over 20 years, is visually stunning. The fragmentation—involving objects and body parts—in the five paintings in the front gallery feels as if we’re witnessing a series of explosions. Her painting “‘S” (2026), in fact, suggests the upheaval of a major tornado—a whirl of orange safety fencing, a human leg clothed in patriotic stripes, sections of signage, a hand holding a gun, and a cartoonlike gust of wind. Certain images in her landscapes reoccur: Southern stereotypes, such as naked feet and moonshine, along with a checkerboard pattern that references both Photoshop and its use in plotting American Indian reservations. “Collapse” (2023) features remnants of a roadside billboard of a crying woman reminiscent of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Paintings and comics are not the only references. The central figure having a tantrum in “Self-Made Man” (2024) depicts a combined male and female figure that recalls the character Major Kong (Slim Pickens), who rode a bomb in Stanley Kubrick’s political satire “Dr. Strangelove” (1964). The same painting depicts fracking and an oil spill. Yet despite the overtly political and gendered content of her imagery, what’s more intriguing is Curtis’s masterful technical proficiency. Her imagery might appear realistic initially, but, on closer inspection, she employs various techniques of faux finishing: variations of wood panels, disparate surfaces, stenciled patterns, directional brushstrokes, and pulverized ash mixed with paint. Curtis’s representational paintings are remarkably complex. They are ultimately about the act of painting itself and all the different ways that an image might be rendered. @post__times @margarcur #roylichtenstein #contemporaryart #contemporarypainting$

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Broc Blegen

@brocblegen