The artist's latest New York exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery as reviewed by Faye Hirsch for Art in America, February 2009
For her first show in New York Since 1987, this Chicago Imagist, one of the original Hairy Who artists of the mid-1960s, showed 11 paintings, most of them from 2007. They feature her signature divas-large, buxom, cartoonish ladies-presiding over parables of vanity and power. In such themes, and in the raucousness of her vision, affinities may be drawn to another artist of her generation-the late Viola Frey, who, though unconnected to Nilsson in any concrete way, was similarly preoccupied. Nilsson’s are modest works, of course, by comparison to Frey’s ceramic giants; none of the pieces in the show are more than 42 inches high or wide, and they are executed in watercolor and gouache on paper, Ni1sson’s medium of choice throughout her long career. As a result, they are perhaps too easily overlooked-regrettably, for their compositions are surprisingly devious and their allusions sly. They reward attentive perusal.
The focus of On Lookers (2007) is a reclining woman who spans the width of the horizontal picture, part interior (a flat orange wail, left) and part landscape (fauvist-colored trees, right). Though she is twisted about like a Cubist nude, her limbs are gummy. The “onlookers”-besides us, of course-are a man in a suit and hat, brim pulled down over his eyes, ironically, and a snowman-amusing surrogates for the two Elders who gaze at Susanna in Renaissance paintings. And the object of our attention is just as comical, with her long nose, pink skirt and blue, low-cut blouse, as she unties a narrow red scarf from around her neck. Nilsson fractures, elongates and bends her figures so that their bodies, sometimes painted in bright, unnatural hues (here the skin is yellow) become conduits, carrying the eye around and through the composition.
In Pink Shadow (2004), a behatted women dressed in green, bag swinging, rushes through the scene (again, both an indoor and outdoor setting), doubled by her “shadow” in orange and pink. The shadow’s head slides back behind a tiny, inset room, confounding the pictoral space. Around the feet of the duplicated, purposeful lady little men turn themselves into pretzel shapes. One suspects a point is being made, though it may just be about not getting in the way of a shopper. Similarly, the main figure in Waterways (2007)-one of a middle-ground consortium of four colorful bathers wading in the surf-twists around to grab a tiny boatful of men, as if to make sport of them. Water flows, birds twitter, and the expressions on the bathers’ faces run from bored to anxious to gay. It’s a rollicking scene, banishing gravitas with flair.
William Nichols
