Mala Iqbal
Print
Misty
Bellwether
In Bellwether’s pristine space on Grand Street, Mala Iqbal’s paintings are alluring and even titillating. A Staten Island native, she says in her artist statement that her work is partly a product of her childhood environment.
Horizon lines are contorted and large skies often loom over strongly foregrounded objects, never people, and these things are often in focus while the rest of the work is blurred. Her larger works, like "Fall Follies" (2003), seem to stretch beyond the limits of what they have to say. They strain to articulate what the smaller works do easily. In the larger works, Iqbal’s sprayed technique is distracting and not as clever; in fact, it is very kitschy.
A smaller work on paper, like "Mushroom and Bricks" (2002), is magical and sensitive. The close-up juxtaposition of the organic forms against the rough red background allows Iqbal to contrast her technique and creates a tension that is arresting.
Two other works, "Crazy Flowers" (2003) and "Starred Plants" (2002), demonstrate another overall effect she revisits again and again. It is an urban American chinoiserie of sorts. Placed against a rough wall-like surface, the plants contort with an arabesque quality along twisting branches. Iqbal’s world is germinated by shiny dollar store art that brings the quirky third-world manufacturers to first world consumers and displays their cultural heritage for a discounted price. Iqbal uses those visualizations and superimposes them on the world around her.
In "My View" (2003) the urban skyline stays close to the bottom edge of the page, like a seventeenth century Dutch landscape. The angular clouds swirl in the sea of a bright red sky. It is deceptively pretty but anyone that has lived somewhere that experiences such piercing redness in the sky, knows that such intensity is often the result of pollution—the joke is very clever. Again the contrast of the delicate silhouette of the city with the canopy of the sky is the key to the tension that makes the image intriguing. Now the question is whether she can go beyond that one trick she’s mastered. Iqbal has a keen eye for effect but seems to prefer ephemeral visuals to carefully planned and executed images. I like where she’s going but she may be on the express train when she should consider taking the local.
Contributor
Hrag VartanianHrag Vartanian is a writer, critic, and designer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Vicky Colombet: Paintings from 2007 – 2018
by Jonathan GoodmanDEC 18-JAN 19 | ArtSeen
Vicky Colombet’s exhibition, Paintings from 2007 – 2018, is serving as a prelude to a major exhibition that will take place at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris in March 2020, for which Colombet will develop a visual dialogue with the great artist. Colombet, a painter of achieved subtlety, is offering a series of pure landscapes—a departure from her earlier work, which suggested stony outcrops and other mountainous depictions.
Giorgio Morandi:
Late Paintings
by David Carrier
APR 2018 | Art Books
Early on Giorgio Morandi was a familiar, but marginal figure within Italian Futurism, who by the time of his death occupied only a modest place in modernist collecting culture. Thanks to important historical work by Janet Abramowicz in Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence (2005), we have a reliable account of Morandi’s life. To this growing corpus, we can now add the perspectives of other contemporary artists collected in Zwirner Books’s Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings.
Abby Leigh: Sledgehammer Paintings
by Alfred Mac AdamOCT 2018 | ArtSeen
Abby Leigh’s visible work seduces with subtle, unassuming color and flashes of silvery metal. We look at these paintings, and it is as if we were peering into a microscope at a specimen displayed on a slide.
Pay to play: the costs of carving new space for dance
by Benedict NguyenFEB 2018 | Dance
What about all the artists who don’t register on the curatorial grid? The recently defunct Createquity has published a lot of research on who gets to be an artist and how saturated the field is with aspiring creatives. Many dance makers are finding space to present or perform their own work outside of the usual venues.
RSS