Beach

Curated by Danny Moynihan, Beach presents sprawling displays in Nino Mier’s two New York spaces of 107 works by an astounding 88 different artists, young and old, alive and dead. Like the tide, it spreads everywhere: into windowfronts, viewing rooms, offices, behind staff desks, and up the tall walls of Crosby Street in Soho. But once the overall, nearly overwhelming, impression recedes, the loose logic behind the display emerges, and one feels swept up engagingly in both its sandy and salty aesthetic breezes and deeper meanings.

The sixty-six works in Soho are crammed against each other on the gallery walls: you enter the large room as if cresting the dunes and spying clusters of chairs and blankets and umbrellas coagulating around a lifeguard post. You then begin hunting for a spot to settle in amidst the paintings—and one sculpture, Peter Land’s huge plastic beach ball The Secret Agent (2017). On the right entry wall, Moynihan has installed a range of small works in multiple mediums, and on the far-right wall he has stacked large paintings in two rows. This instantly and pleasantly recalls the close groupings of works in summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, an approach long familiar from academies and salons in the Western tradition. That first wall at right is host to a slew of big names, but is anchored smartly by a quietly monumental, sensuous, and brightly colored work by Ridley Howard, Summer Sky (2023), with its Antonioni-esque cropped female torso along the left edge and a recumbent and sunglassed quarter-profile female face at the bottom right. Howard’s graphic sharpness is partly indebted to the work of Tom Wesselmann, here represented by two small but stridently hued Sunset Nude studies from 2002/3. Adjacent are a pair of fairly perfect Picasso ink drawings of bathers from his “return to order” period in the 1920s, as well as a Matisse ink drawing of a reclining female nude with a loose bangle on her left arm and no background—an understandable stretch of the theme to work that other modernist denizen of the Côte d’Azur into the mix.

Other standouts include an exquisite papier collé by the ocean-averse polymath Joe Brainard, Untitled (Greek Bathers) from 1978, its line-engraved Hermes by Praxiteles overlaid by a photograph of a bulging Speedo; Lola Gil’s oil and acrylic Salty (2023), its blurred photographic background of a kneeling post-war bather similarly layered with a sharply realist vintage Empoli glass decanter figurine and blown-glass pooch; and Larry Rivers’s portrait of bikini-clad Clarice from 1964. This wall of concentrated images of bathers is bookended by Jonathan Wateridge’s sparkling Expatria Study No. 10 (2018), a kind of blown-up Winslow Homer watercolor work in oils depicting the memory of a Black man lounging on a raft in a pool in Zambia, and Benjamin Spiers’s natural reader (2022–23) wherein Max Ernst meets Louise Bonnet with a tubular bibliophile on a black sand shore. Bonnet herself is represented by a colored pencil drawing from 2017.

The salon-hung right wall, with its thirteen large works, continues the bathers theme but with a broader scope, depicting bodies in the landscape. The central image is Walter Robinson’s fresh and sweeping Bathers (Three Women) (2023), a play on numerous images of modernist triads from Cézanne on up. But here the Barbie-stiff femmes are in three-quarter length and monumentalized against a sweeping beclouded sky: the work is AI-generated with adjustment by the artist, per his recent figural practice, and in profitable contradiction to Midjourney programming that dissuades against nudity. Above it is Moon Bather (2023), a symboliste fantasie by Corri-Lynn Tetz, with a contemporary lunar Lorelei in a floral silk robe, and Kate Gottgens’s On the Beach (2023), showing another triad of monumental female beachgoers, their forms blurred and scuffed by great sweeps of paint as if viewed through eyes not yet rubbed clear of seawater.

The rear wall features unpeopled beaches, from the perfectly named Icelander Erna Mist’s Dream City (2022), whose nocturnal vortex of mazes that appear as if made of sand call to mind Harald Sohlberg’s symbolist landscapes, to Jake Longstreth’s stark Kensett Grill (2023), with a lollipop of an outdoor stove that serves as a Friedrichian Rückenfigur and a romantic, blasted tree posed against a serene aqueous background that is equal parts bayside Marin County and John Frederick Kensett Americana. A beautiful Jane Freilicher from 2001 with its tripartite banding like a color field painting lies hard by Entering the marshes (Boy Beach) (2023) by Dylan Hurwitz, whose rolling forms resemble what Grant Wood might have come up with if he had hung out on the coasts instead of land-locked Iowa.

The left wall and left entry wall represent bathing and beachgoing through the lenses of surrealism and myth, with Kyle Staver’s mermaids and a Kate Klingbeil construction with horses in the surf. But the standout is Matthew Hansel’s Balance Fails To Seduce Those Who Find Pleasure In The Fall (2023), a tumult of interlaced large figures engaged in a demented game of Twister on the sands under a yellow and white umbrella. The pleasures of this picture are many, from its assured treatment of flesh and scales and wings to its intricate weaving of limbs and the humorous motif of a monochromatic figure in the deep background with binoculars standing by a row boat and gazing with an impossible-to-register expression at the foreground antics. Hansel productively mines Bosch, Bronzino, and Michelangelo’s Temptation of Saint Anthony after Schongauer, as well as great illustrators such as Charles Vess. Hansel’s beach is equal parts playground and high-stakes morality play, and its serious tone leads us to the themes of the TriBeCa display, just out the door and to the right down Broadway.

Here, in a far more intimate space, forty-one works are grouped in themes of naturalia still life, the self, and history, with an ample dose of peril and climate alarm. This is signaled by Tony Matelli’s Atlas (2016) sculpture in the front window, a concrete, steel, and painted bronze concoction of an unclad bent-over figure, who bears the sensitivity of a George Segal sculpture. He also bears on his inclined head a king crab: symptomatic of our failed stewardship of the planet and its imperiled fauna. Alexis Rockman’s Bikini Beach (2023) illuminates our role in this extreme dilemma in oil, wax, and sand, with mutated fish and crustaceans depicted amidst the detritus of our disposable culture: bottles, cans, paper, and other jetsam in an irradiated beachscape. Less visually strident is Sean Landers’s Sperm Whale Skeleton II (2022), from a series of operatic pictures of decayed beached cetaceans that serve as a stand-in for both natural mortality and the limits of artistic influence over time. Esme Hodsoll’s delicate and seductively painted oil on copper Oysters (2023), life-sized at 6 3/4 × 8 3/4 inches, is not quite so weighty and represents a reimagining of Ruskinian naturalism and aestheticist tonalism.

The end wall of the TriBeCa space is filled by Swedish painter Mia Enell’s nearly 8-foot-wide acrylic Giant Footprint (2022), an example of the artist’s contemporary poster aesthetic that conveys the personal presence so richly evident in the pictures here. This is especially evident on the right wall, which features a range of works tinged by histories both broad and intimate. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s grand Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies… (2023) combines the tonality of Pollock’s similarly titled and mixed-media drip work at MoMA with the grand narratives of Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” series and the layered illustrations of underwater creatures in LIFE Nature Library books that imprinted so deeply on me as a child. The artist’s grandiose attempt to depict the history of the Atlantic, with its sea battles, aquatic life, modern shipping, and impastoed pollution is both Turnerian in scope and visually arresting. On this wall weather makes its appearance in a pairing of another work by Sean Landers, Northeaster (2022), and a Eugène Delacroix shipwreck from 1862. Psychology and sexuality creep in with Noelia Towers’s Sea Swallow Me (2023), with its titular nod to the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd, showing a female figure kneeling in the surf in full bondage suit, a picture masterful in its conveyance of textural variations and narrative ambiguity. The pensive atmosphere continues with Matvey Levenstein’s Self-portrait (2020), a finely-toned image of himself seen from behind, in a coat and jeans walking along a floriated shore. The exhibition closes with a suite of six dark and intimate colored pencil drawings by Elizabeth Shull from this year with titles such as Trapped Gently at Sea and Overwhelming. Here nature echoes the human condition, and the limitless sea offers no answers but instead a kind of seductive steadiness—these works are meditative in both form and process.

The celebratory nature of the SoHo display contrasts with the more melancholy Tribeca offerings, a tension that parallels the twin references in the show’s title. Beach is a site (though images of developed beachfront, and the urban shoreline, perhaps our most familiar experience of the sea, are conspicuously absent), but it is also an injunction. To beach is to cause someone to suffer a loss, or like Landers’s sperm whale, to be stranded out of one’s element. The desolation in that reading elevates the varied sentiments of this summer show, reflecting the continued drive to interpret our most frequent point of contact with that alternately amazing and abused carbon sink that dominates our planet.