Radical Figures review – sex, snakes, sprouting heads and flying burgers

Whitechapel Gallery, London
The death of painting is always much exaggerated as this engaging show of figurative work by 10 contemporary painters richly demonstrates

‘Representational painting has been deeply unfashionable and largely superseded by photography and video among young, ambitious artists since the critical backlash against neo-expressionism in the 1980s,” reads a wall text at the start of Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. This is untrue, as well as a huge oversimplification. In 1994, I stopped a press release going out for a painting show I curated for London’s Hayward, which said that painting was “past its sell-by date”. Here we go again.

The end of painting is always kinda sexy. With its profusion of bodies of one sort or another, the artists in this exhibition aren’t so much the walking dead, going blithely on with a dead medium, so much as taking on board the idea that painting can do things other media can’t. Dead or alive, painting goes on. Its end is always being rehearsed and rehashed, perhaps from painting to painting. And much of what we see here – resplendent bodies, irradiated bodies, bodies imagined from the inside, spectral bodies, remembered bodies, cartoonish bodies, impossible bodies – has all come into being through the particularities of a medium. The presence, too – or rather absence – of the painters Marlene Dumas, Maria Lassnig, Chris Ofili and Peter Doig, who all came to prominence in the 80s and 90s, is felt in much of the work of the 10 artists here.

Daniel Richter, at 57 the oldest painter in the show, can be funny. Frequently compared (and even confused) with Doig – their ways of rendering trees, figures and mountains have sometimes been similar – Richter has a more scattergun approach to images: a turbaned Taliban and the Marlboro man having a smoke on a mountain, a naked woman in high heels getting up to hanky-panky in the woods – till she turns her head and we see the face of a grinning, bearded mujahid. I’m not sure gender-fluidity is really Richter’s thing. His best work here is a 2001 image of a group of north African refugees approaching Tarifa on a life raft at night, their clothes and faces fluorescing and fracturing in the light of heat-sensitive cameras as they float above the black swell of the Gibraltar strait.

With her blizzards of nearly cohering fragments that assemble and disassemble and almost coalesce just as they are flying apart, Cecily Brown’s paintings barely seem new. The wearying, histrionic flux of her art, rather like the forced humour of Richter’s paintings, and the repetitive satire of Tala Madani’s little pictures of pudgy, balding and bearded Iranian men going about their salacious interludes, their prayers and their business, ends up enervating rather than exciting.

In Russian-born, US-based Sanya Kantarovsky’s work, an ill-tempered baby clings to its mother’s bent back like a horrible goading parasite, its hands clasping her red nipple as she struggles through the gloom, with bloodied knees and elbows. The mother here is a sort of stoic victim. In Deprivation, a man leans over a woman, her face hidden, on a bed. She is naked, he still has his shirt on, and it looks as if he is prising his hand out of hers. I do not like this guy, nor the spiderish way he looms over her, nor how his sandy hair falls over his scalp. Nor, indeed, the sickliness of the scene. There are some unexplained, nasty backstories informing the images, and how they are painted.

A jumble of faces – as though multiple personalities or theatrical roles – flit through the mind of a single person in Ryan Mosley’s Duchess of Oils. In another painting, a bearded man smoking a pipe does something with snakes, and with a number of legs that have inexplicably sprouted heads. I’m reminded here of Enrico David’s sculptural tableaux, but I haven’t a clue where Mosley is going with all this.

Another pair of snakes slithers through one of Michael Armitage’s paintings, all of which use a cloth made from bark, or lubugo, as a support: the cloth is more usually used for funeral shrouds in Armitage’s native Kenya. Mostly, the viewer doesn’t notice it, but I guess there are practical as well as symbolic reasons to use it. Its unevenness adds a certain resistance to his painting process, forcing him into moves he might otherwise not make. Two young men kiss, with a sort of inner glow, in a darkened room. A frieze, up by the ceiling in the gloom, has motifs of shooting and death, alluding to Kenya’s draconian laws against homosexuality. In another painting, a group of men look down at a woman lying in a fusty bower. She is in the pose of Velázquez’s so-called Rokeby Venus, a painting that was slashed in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson. The woman here is about to be violated, too, by the group of men whose feet stand in a row at the top of the canvas.

Christina Quarles, whose works were recently at the Hepworth Wakefield, shows more of the same here. Her lascivious, fraught bodies morph and slew, clutching at themselves and at one another in scenes that are as much to do with a disjunctive repertoire of painterly and graphic devices, a drama of forms, as they are to do with any human action.

Upstairs, Nicole Eisenman blows everything we’ve seen so far out of the water, with a pair of gigantic 2006 paintings titled Progress: Real and Imagined. In the left panel, the artist sits hunched in her studio on a rackety houseboat, drawing with a quill in a notebook. She’s all at sea in her floating studio. Great lumps of paint congeal on her palette. Flowers explode like fireworks from a vase. Stuff flies around the studio, someone drowns in the waves, the captain is at the tiller looking serious. There is so much to look at here. In the second panel, describing a ribald female utopia, there are foxhunts with hounds, a water-birthing, beach scenes, sex, death and fishing, and much besides. Hamburgers fly overhead. Painterly, cartoonish, thick and thin, hilarious, horrible, delicate, monstrous, funny and inventive, this is a world without men – except for a decapitated fellow who gawps bleakly on the shore.

Another 2008 painting depicts a Brooklyn beer garden, with boozers and bores, hipsters and has-beens, divas and dykes, dancing and kissing, slurping and slumping, smoking and arguing. A waiter moves implacably through the throng. Lights dance on the trees, and death looks back at us through the crowd. This is all enormous fun. A more recent 2016 painting depicts a dusky seeping head under a pale yellow moon. This thickly painted, rough and tender image sleeps oblivious through the clamour around us.

Eisenman’s art is full of life. Real life and the painter’s life. She takes things to another level. Dana Schutz, who hangs opposite Eisenman, can at least stand up to all this with her rumbustious, glaring, painterly images. The roaring comic quality of her work, and their setting on some overheated beach where a man eats his own chest (it looks more as if he’s vomiting), a wide-eyed cousin to one of Picasso’s neoclassical nudes sculpts herself some new legs and a couple ill-advisedly go to sea in an overcrowded little boat have an oomphing sort of elan. Other figures crowd under a beach umbrella, the shore littered with fish bones.

In Tschabalala Self’s New York scenes a female cop, her gun sewn to her uniform, stares us down. A couple at a bodega stand before a wall of photocopied, hand-coloured product wrappings. Another pair of painted figures, each with a canvas of their own, compete with gigantic red legs painted on the wall behind and around them. Self’s work needs some funky music to go with it. There should be more of it, partying on while painting dies – or doesn’t.

Contributor

Adrian Searle

The GuardianTramp

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