Red Grooms at Marlborough

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Red Grooms is a master of outsized, densely packed and rollicking takes on city life. His recent paintings (200607), shown at Marlborough's uptown venue, don't deliver the three-dimensional ruckus of his constructions and environments, but they are hardly sedate. One group, a sextet of 8-foot-square canvases, reinterprets the iconography of the Metropolitan Museum's medieval Unicorn Tapestries as a ribald, carnivalesque narrative that relates the hunt for the unicorn, its corpse being carried triumphantly into town and its eventual resurrection in a utopian setting, happily domesticated among tiny peasants.

Grooms's art always abhors a vacuum, but never more appropriately than in these magnificent paintings, which are so vividly brushed and so jam-packed with figures, animals, foliage and pattern that they rival the actual tapestries in texture and decorative richness. They also evidence Grooms's extraordinary eye for the telling detail and identifying feature of the material or person he represents, whether heavily bearded, stalwart knights in chain mail, plumed lords in full-display mode, wimpled ladies or an elaborately pompadoured and curled lion.

A different pictorial tradition surfaces in another series that conjures up the Depression as well as vintage '40s film noir and true crime tales. Scenes of gamblers, drunks, pool sharks, gangsters with their molls, femmes fatales and hard-boiled detectives nod to American realist painting, but their touchstone is Weegee's photographic documentation of the urban underworld. Grooms revels in another form of citation in Arbus at the Met, his gleefully imaginative reconstruction of the recent retrospective of the photographer's works and archives. The 6-by-10-foot grisaille painting, itself like a black-and-white print, shows some of Arbus's subjects incongruously brought together at the exhibition. The subject of Arbus's Patriotic Young Man With a Flag accompanies the family from her Young Brooklyn Couple; the Woman With a Veil on Fifth Avenue and the Human Pincushion stand side by side; two of her nudists contemplate the photographs on the museum's walls, while the individuals from A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx appear to be discussing the merits of the show. Arbus herself waits with camera ready at the canvas's left edge.

In yet another ensemble at Marlborough, well known artists appear with references to their works in letter-paper-size paintings that suggest casual portraits of friends. Sonia Delaunay poses before a wall featuring an abstract design of concentric circles, Morandi gazes out over his bottles, and Brancusi sits with his tools before three of his "Endless Column" sculptures, holding a shutter release cable to photograph himself. These depictions don't erupt with the same conglomeration of incident and information as the other paintings, but taken together, the exhibition demonstrated that Grooms's visual appetite can accommodate not only whatever locales he chooses to visit in his work, but the styles of other artists as well.

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