Rebecca Morgan
Asya Geisberg Gallery is proud to present ”Painting in the Apocalypse,” an exhibition of paintings by Rebecca Morgan. In her sixth show with the gallery, Morgan asks how to present images in the face of a raging political landscape. She engages potent themes from all her eras: sympathy for her rural background, feminist reappraisal of art history, and an unbridled excitement at infusing humor and technical prowess into her unabashed critique. Here she sharpens the political content by making it more specific and savage. Haunting images, circling obsessively in Morgan’s mind’s-eye, find their way to fruition in a variety of painterly languages.
Morgan's strategic reimagining of art history suggests a possible coping mechanism. The titular artwork, “Painting in the Apocalypse,” inspired by Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait,” adds to prior Morgan themes of paintings within a painting. Here, instead of looking into a mirror as in Rockwell’s portrait, the artist stares back at us from a miasma of fiery orange brushwork, in horror, as if to say - are you seeing what I’m seeing? How can I make art at a time like this?
The emotional turmoil made physical in “Crash-Out”, or the murky reds of “Two White Demons Screaming at Each Other” further the darker tone of the show. Opposing visions of heaven and hell use the Odalisque genre swapped for a male body: in “When It Happens” a double rainbow forms and a happy crab climbs atop a grotesque bloated body. In “Andy After Sylvia Sleigh”, the artist’s partner is rendered naturalistically in an updated homage to the male nude portraits of ‘70s Sleigh. The romantic partner or muse, ensconced in the pastoral, points to a desire to retreat into domestic idyll.
A more brutal response is depicted in “Hunter Gatherer in the Apocalypse.”A half-naked grey-haired crone casually puffs out smoke, as her hand rests on a pike piercing through a man with the whisper of a red ball cap. Positing a matriarchal revolution, or a survivalist, the character could well be the artist’s future self. Indeed, from an oeuvre full of self-portraiture, the only clear self-portait is “Sorry I’ve Been Supine” - using a ‘70s collectible to show an understandable paralysis after prolonged exposure to the heightened volume of current events.
Smaller works in the show show a wider range of styles: from the lush landscape of “Ivanna’s Grave” reputedly in a golf course, the goofily specific “Trad Wife”-influencer with her legions of children and egg-holding apron, to the portrait of “Druski as Erica Kirk”, a podcaster in whiteface and drag - itself a sort of painting style.
In the show, exploration of painting leads the way through the mire: the gnarly yet luscious feet melting into the sand, the loving legs of her partner, the sfumato flames of the apocalypse, or tubular eyes reflecting the magnetic glow of the phone screen. Morgan presents no one answer to the premise of the exhibition, only an energized push forward. We can’t go on, we must go on, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett’s refrain.