[caption id="attachment_1570" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Mickalene Thomas, Mama Bush: (Your love keeps lifting me) higher and higher, 2009."][/caption]
Courtesy of artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.
Mickalene Thomas’ first solo exhibition in New York, She’s Come Undone, opened at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea space last Thursday. It is an exhibition of brightly-colored, feel-good paintings, what I might term Pop art with decals, and is definitely worth a visit, especially because of the work’s relationship to popular trends in contemporary art. This is a good chance to see art representative “of the moment.”
The lovely odalisques, resplendent in their powerful sexuality and addressing a history of poses popular with French artists from Manet to Matisse, also celebrate the woman from a woman’s perspective. From top-selling artists such as Raquib Shaw (who also uses a mixture of painting and sparkling collaged elements) to the exhibition, MA’s curate MFA’s, on now at Hunter College, it is clear that identity has yet to lose momentum. But in Thomas’s work, this is the positive reflection of identity, rather than the sort of identity-crisis art that has been so ubiquitous. This is the message of the day – celebration of identity. Thomas turns her paintings into loud and confident tributes to the black woman’s sexuality and power.
In another sort of combination of trends, we see the blending of figurative painting – very prevalent now - along with the shining glitz of sequins added in an unmistakably ‘crafty’ way. The decorative backgrounds place themselves somewhere between the delightful interiors of Nabis painters like Bonnard and Vuillard and the vulgarity of Rococo. Altogether, the paintings are quite reminiscent of the neo-Baroque work of artist Kehinde Wiley, who attended graduate school along with Thomas at Yale.
While the specific identity which Thomas celebrates was unique when she first showed it, the work does not feel as if it has developed in complexity or personal expression. But it is nice, decorative, positive, and contemporary. Sort of a snapshot of “What we want from artists in 2009.”
