Is there anything Leidy Churchman can’t paint? Among the subjects of the twenty-one paintings in the New York phenom’s show at the Matthew Marks gallery, which was interrupted by the pandemic, are a fever-dream bedroom, a moonrise, a girl on a bike, a rose garden, a monkey-filled forest from the Ramayana, hypnotic abstractions, and a laundry-room sign. The palette runs from monochrome black to hot purple and pink; dimensions change from a scant dozen inches to more than ten feet. The only logic at work is intuitive, even oracular. The mood is less image-overload restless than it is optimistically omnivorous—Churchman seems hungry to paint the whole world in all its mystery and ordinariness, two categories that often collide here. In Churchman’s deft hands, a cropped closeup of an iPhone 11 assumes a third-eye mysticism worthy of Hilma af Klint.
That last sentence is inspired!
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| Leidy Churchman, iPhone 11 (2019-20) |
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