Sarah Rapson at Cohan Leslie and Browne - New York - Brief Article

Sarah Rapson's work is largely about obsessive longing for a past era and for the deliverance that success represents to the hardworking but obscure artist. This stunningly mordant show incorporated paintings, altered photographs and a film.

The paintings, which dominated the gallery, utilize a reductive palette of bright white, bone white or warm and cool gray. If their colors are Rymanesque, their corporeal, lumpy contours--a result of Rapson's method of building up paint and paper over years, massaging and rounding the edges--evoke the work of Eva Hesse. As objects, the paintings also look a bit like abstracted versions of Robert Gober's sink sculptures. Their smoothed, opaque surfaces mask layers of newspaper art reviews, gallery announcements and exhibition" checklists. Although this printed ephemera is illegible on the surfaces of the paintings, sometimes fragments are visible on the sides of the canvases. For instance, one can make out the names of well-established London galleries (Lisson, Marlborough) on the sides of In Mad in Pursuit (1996-2001), a nine-part group of canvases.

Affixed to the center of most of the paintings are small black-and-white images that Rapson has culled from photographs documenting the art world of the 1960s and 1970s. They are generally group shots, such as one of Andy Warhol and his assistants working at the Factory or another showing the spectators at an early feminist art performance. (The exhibition also included a series of framed drawings that begin with similar images ripped from magazines.) Onto each figure in the photos, Rapson draws the same mane of black hair. It's her artistic surrogate: we see Frank Stella painting one of his early stripe paintings with Sarah Rapson Long Black Hair, or Lucio Fontana with Sarah Rapson Long Black Hair or everyone at an opening or in an art school class in Sarah Rapson Long Black Hair.

This same device is used in the grainy black-and-white film, Cathcart Hill, where a jumpy, handheld camera documents the artist visiting the Tate Modern. Wearing a long black wig and acting agitated, she is first seen alone, then with a child in her arms, and later wheeling the child in a stroller over a Carl Andre floor sculpture or impatiently flipping through an art magazine in one of the museum's lounge areas. The hysteria of the blackwigged character Rapson plays in the film echoes the obsessive behavior she follows in her studio, where she is compelled to line her monochrome paintings with gallery detritus. Rapson's message is that the great steamer trunk of modernism is now packed with commerce. A depressing thought--but a bracing one, too.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group