Critic’s Pick by Johanna Fateman
Mira Schor: Death Is A Conceptual Artist, installation view
“Are you a feminist artist?” is a dogged refrain, running like an earworm through Mira Schor’s new exhibition of oil paintings and delicate works on paper. Rendered in the artist’s fluid, unfussy script—the hallmark of her painterly conceptualism and long-standing investigations of language as image—the text fills small boxy speech bubbles at eye-level with a repeated figure, ostensibly the feminist artist in question. She’s depicted as a playfully morbid diagram, reduced to a set of signs, a sparsely accessorized stick figure with breasts and a skull. Schor’s distilled figuration is not a dry semiotic exercise, though. Schor’s very into her materials, and employs an edge of angry wit.
MIRA SCHOR: DEATH IS A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST
March 18 – April 24, 2016
LYLES & KING
106 Forsyth Street, New York, NY
Where Darkness Doubles Light Pours In: Mira Schor at Lyles & King
by Bradley Rubenstein
Paul of Tarsus wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know…” This passage from Corinthians comes to mind when looking at the recent work of Mira Schor, now at Lyles & King. Schor’s paintings, dark, compactly strong meditations on mortality, power, and language, show an artist wrestling with the big questions. Schor has always been a painter who confronted politics, art history, and painting head-on, and these new paintings don’t veer far from that course.
Mira Schor, Death Is A Conceptual Artist, 2015, oil on linen, 24″ x 45″
Schor’s most recent body of work presented the figure as avatar, a stick-figure understudy for the artist, in a series of “selfie” self-portraits. In Death Is A Conceptual Artist (2015), that figure has become a golem of sorts, its head a skull wearing a translucent shift, with umbilical lines of paint connecting breasts to books or text panel cue cards, and a giant floating flower. The umbilical lines are a deep red oxide, suggesting blood—little lifelines, of knowledge being passed to a new generation, and of tradition being traded at great expense. Schor understands the vocabulary of the millennial generation, yet her work suggests that there are traditions in painting that are slowly being degraded or forgotten—lost knowledge coming at great expense to our shared cultural understanding. Death Is A Conceptual Artist is schematic with the pieces of nature, culture, and self all separate but connected. Her paintings are a sly nod to “selfie” culture and her inclusion of text a rebuke to a generation who are leaving Facebook for Instagram because it uses “less words.”
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