There is a series of portraits of the late, legendary New York gallerists Pat Hearn and
Colin de Land by Nina Childress, from 2023. Pat fur is larger than life (210x150 cm),
and Hearn looks straight at us with open, expectant eyes; her lips red, her nose a bit,
too. She wears pearl earrings, and a huge fur hat that glows from behind in glaring
yellow, off-colored like in an old Polaroid. Childress evokes a bygone era, the New
York art scene of the 1980s and 90s (Hearn died in 2000 at the age of 45, of cancer,
as did de Land at 48, in 2003). Colin Cigarette (night view) celebrates de Land in
three-quarter profile, with a cigarette stump dangling from his lips, tousled head of
hair, furrowed eyebrows, long moody eyelashes. The picture is phosphorescent
green and glows in the dark.
But just as you thought Childress presented the two like Faye Dunaway and
Warren Beatty in Bonny & Clyde, another set of smaller canvases adds a pinch of
cheesy absurdity. The eyes are a bit too big and the shoulders and torso a bit too
small in Colin de Land facing/Pat Hearn facing, adding a Barbie-and-Ken-ness to the
romantic, glamorizing drift. A landscape format shows Hearn standing in a corporate
gallery space with extravagant, pink and black Cleopatra eye makeup. The title is
”Now the market is better and we outgrew the funkiness”: a quote by Hearn from a
1998 artforum interview, regarding the future of the Gramercy art fair – later renamed
Armory Show – she had co-founded with de Land and others. The paintings were
conceived for a presentation at The Art Show, an annual art fair at the Armory. A
satirical and bitter note comes into play: even the legendary Hearn was not immune
against the awkwardness of market conformity.
Executed with painterly grace and a great range of variation, going from hyper-
realism straight to cartoonish abstraction and back, Nina Childress creates portrait
epiphanies evoking romanticism and glamor. They are undergirded though by a
sense of the ridiculous and the tacky, never staying silent about the self-
contradictions and the awkward social realities. Childress – born in 1961 in
Pasadena, California, but having lived most of her life in France – knew Hearn back
from the 1980s. Portrait of Pat Hearn and Chichi – Chichi, her doggy – from 1985 is
painted in brisk Punk/New Wave cartoon style. The earliest work in Childress’s
catalogue raisonné goes back to 1980; often signed with her punk-singer name Nina
Kuss, these early-eighties works quickly took on a satirical twist, whether it was an
achingly anemic portrait of Prince Charles and Lady Diana (She wants a double bed,
1981), or a hilariously candy-colored panopticon of the TV characters from Dallas
(1982). Soon the work took a turn towards the “neo-primitivist” cartoon style that was
prevalent during the early to mid-80s, with artists such as Keith Haring and Kenny
Scharf from New York, or Milan Kunc from Dusseldorf.
This style could have become a dead-end for Childress, but with her
breakthrough 1987 Portrait de Sylvie Vartan, she took a different turn: based on a
glamor shot of the Yé-Yé-singer from the 1970s, with flirtatious hydrogen-blonde
forelock and a necklace of predatory teeth, in the painting her eyes are slightly
askew, while the background is dominated by a psychedelic pattern of concentric
double rings, equally askew, in sharply contrasting blue, red and yellow. In
Childress’s paintings, women are not simply hyper-fetishized objects – as, later, in
works by Richard Phillips – but they much more often are subjects controlling the
gaze.
Childress continued to experiment with subject matters, and painterly
techniques (to the extent that she has also ventured into sculpture). And she has
addressed the question of object fetishization head-on, with hilarious effect. Whether
incessantly painting Tupperware (1990), gummy sweets (1991/2), soap bars
(1992/3), or more recently, glam metal rock stars (2022), Childress does not accept
any motif as too banal, too unworthy of depiction. In that, she is close in spirit to the
likes of the late Francis Picabia (with his adaptions of corny image material), Bernard
Buffet (his “bad taste” romantic miserabilism) the Belgian line of artists following from
René Magritte’s Périod vache, or the Germans that, in the 1980s and 90s, built on
Sigmar Polke’s wacky pop (namely Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, Albert
Oehlen). But also, not to forget, the American sensibility for the grotesquely comical
as in George Condo, or the weird and the hobbyist, maybe best expressed in Jim
Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings. What all of these positions have in common is a
rebellion against having “outgrown the funkiness“, allowing painting to be probing and
experimental again without being stopped by professed seriousness and the
dogmatic boundaries of taste (in the large-scale group exhibition “Ridiculously
Yours!” of 2022/23, featuring the work of Childress, Cristina Ricupero and me as co-
curators have described this particular artistic sensibility as “enthusiastic
awkwardness”).
In Childress’s case, the humor comes with feminist punchlines, maybe most
hilariously manifested in her 2018 faithful copy of a self-portrait by the painter
Alphonse Fauré, who depicted himself in unintentional comedy with a black béret,
grey painter’s smock, red bow tie and a meaningful gaze wandering into the endless
distance. It is what makes Childress’s grandiose oeuvre so outstanding: for more
than four decades, she has never lost the desire to test the boundaries of
awkwardness and embarrassment, and never lost the desire to experiment, all for the
sake of laughter, and art.
