The current group exhibition "Seven Artists Figurative Show" at Buckhead's Tew Galleries is a delightfully frothy confection with some shrewd commentary to complicate the sweetness. There's something necessary and distracting about the amount of whimsy on display in this appealing group show. It's a reminder that those of us who can momentarily dwell in the silly, fanciful, imaginative side of life — even briefly — are probably the better off for it.
There are some old Tew favorites and new blood in the mix. The wonderfully oddball Berlin artist Stephanus Heidacker, who has a thing for young women balancing wieners on their heads, is back with his slightly creepy Balthus-style nothing-to-look-at-here-folks images of young women playing with guns, or squaresville middle-aged men painting birdhouses. Everyone is going about their business per their usual but something is certifiably off in Heidacker’s lovely, colorful vignettes, like dreams where real life intersects with the gooey mire of the subconscious.
Working a similar strain of enchanted goofballery, Atlanta’s own Charles Keiger has long been marrying Southern gothic to non-sequitur magical realism. And he’s back with works like “The Honeymoon” where two fully-dressed newlyweds float in a lake the color of battery acid as two Cadillac-sized catfish watch the proceedings. Keiger’s scenes straddle a line between blissed out and bad trip, and it’s up to the viewer to decide which direction they want to take things.
One thing you can say about this crowd: They’re wacky, but they can paint like nobody’s business. Case in point: Barcelona-based artist Mario Soria who tops his own gorgeously rendered portraits with graffiti and with globs of paint that spread across his canvas like fat caterpillars, playfully defacing his miniature oil paintings on canvas. Like a revolutionary toppling the power structure, Soria paints his aristocrats as two-headed freaks and in “Great Toupee Duke” as clueless fops with three-arms and ludicrous hairdos. Soria’s canvases glow with life and pulsate with genuine strangeness though he tends toward overkill in his plastic toy-encrusted frames that can distract from his sublime technique.
Also riffing on the portraiture of yesteryear, Stephen O’Donnell’s skillful acrylic-on-panel paintings look like illustrations from a very adult chapter book where lithesome young hotties are draped in jewels and clutch silky fabrics around their nakedness. Inverting the usual gender stereotypes, O’Donnell places his pretty young men in the kind of passive, come-hither poses you’d expect of female models. The artist even gets in on the action, painting himself dressed in fancy 18th and 19th-century gowns and wigs, his chest hair poking out of a bodice to deliciously goose the masquerade. Hilarious interrogations of the male gaze, the work pairs nicely with the simpatico paintings by Tew newcomer, German-born and Seattle-based Anne Siems whose blend of delicacy and defiance characterizes her female portraits like “Tiger” featuring hipster girls in vintage dresses and tattoos defiantly marching to their own drummer. Siems’ sensual, striking paintings are gorgeous celebrations of identity and attitude that, like O’Donnell’s, defy our expectations of male and female beauty and behavior.
Working defiance of another sort, Savannah artist Cedric Smith presents romantic, elegant pictures of black subjects to counter decades of racist caricature, like roses placed around a loved one’s altar. Mixed media works like “The Reader” feature a nattily dressed, handsome young man perched on a giant tree branch like a well-dressed songbird. Smith’s portraits of black life posit his figures in a lush nature which lovingly cradles and ornaments them, showing them off to their best advantage. His embrace of advertising, decorating his works with nods to luxury brands like Alexander McQueen and Louis Vuitton pairs well with Melissa Sims movie-poster-style scenarios thick with resin featuring cowboys and Hollywood femme fatales, motel signs and other bits of Americana.
ART REVIEW
“Seven Artists Figurative Show”
Through Feb. 28. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays. Free. Tew Galleries, 425 Peachtree Hills Ave. N.E., #24, Atlanta. 404-869-0511, www.tewgalleries.com
Bottom line: Often sweet and hilarious on the surface, many of these paintings question long-held views about race, class and gender.
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