The Brooklyn Rail

Tribeca has been sprouting galleries every season since the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ruttkowski;68, located in the Cortlandt Alley since early 2023, is an emerging gallery active in Europe for the last decade, and is the latest addition in this sizzling neighborhood. It shows mostly European artists or artists from outside the United States. Playdate, the title of the exhibition, highlights the work of Susan Te Kahurangi King and Philip Emde. The former, a New Zealand artist, who has been non-verbal her whole life. In this exhibition we see a selection of early work from the 1960s, when King was a teenager, made before the artist stopped drawing between the 1990s–2008. The latter, Philip Emde, is a German artist whose imagery centers on plush animals and is showing a selection of new paintings in acrylic from 2023.

King has been an artist since she was four years old, drawing in graphite, colored pencil, and crayons on a variety of paper formats. It is her main form of expression, as she has been non-verbal since that age. Thus, she is rightly viewed as one of many recognized and celebrated self-taught artists, who have come to art through paths different from those studying and responding to the great artists in art history. Yet, it was the modernist artists who recognized many other forms of art making outside of the canon, as sources of inspiration for experimentation, spontaneity, abstraction, and considered it perhaps a more sincere form of expression. King’s work was introduced in the US a decade ago, and to the world in 2009, and keeps growing with institutional interest.

In King’s work we see classic Disney characters that are recognizable in their form and clothing color schemes, but also slightly distorted in their heads and bodies such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Pluto the dog. In Untitled from 1963/64 and later in 1967, some additional Looney Tunes characters appear like Tweety Bird and Road Runner. Whether as moving images or as cartoon illustrations, these Western characters are imprinted in the heads of most children globally, reintroduced across time from their first introduction in the 1930s. Life lessons can be learned from Donald Duck, through whom we can live vicariously the expressions of exaggerated joy, anger, embarrassment, pride, betrayal, and sadness. King recognized something in these characters that made it possible for her to build a visual world with them participating in it.

The first piece that struck me, facing the entrance to the gallery was Untitled (1964) which is a grouping of minimal diverse animal outlines drawn in graphite ranging from penguin, bird, elephant, camel, lizard, turtle, frog, fish, seahorse—and two humanoid forms seemingly carrying a vertical stave-shovel. Could this be Noah’s Ark? The top-most cluster reminds me of petroglyphs and is lined up in rows like hieroglyphs, facing or moving to the right side of the page and the tier grouping underneath is curved downwards, but the animals are all facing and moving leftwards, except for the humans and the dancing devil facing right. Likewise, a few other works such as the group in Untitled (1964) on the gallery’s long left wall indicate a cluster of colored pencil figures super and juxtaposed in flat space sequestered and surrounded in groups by a curvilinear island frontier.

What does this arrangement mean? Clearly the artist was organizing these shapes into a meaningful order, leaving a sea of empty flat space like in Eastern painting. This same attention to the cluster of tiny drawn images facing left can be seen on the top tier of Untitled (1963) also in this group. In this drawing, we recognize the child’s colorful scribbles in the midst of these carefully drawn in and repeating circles arranged in a string. I wonder also if, having been exposed to Māori culture, perhaps through her father who taught the language, some Māori symbols and hyper-expressive faces in rituals like the Haka have entered her visual vocabulary. There is an attention to large eyes and tongues sticking out in her figurations, but I cannot say that this is directly related to Māori rites compared to the exaggerated expressions seen in animated characters.

Emde’s paintings offer brightly colored and textured painting surfaces for the eye drawn to painterly painting, of thin brushwork mixed with thick layered paint, where the plush animals have bodies depicted in one color on neutral beige and gray geometric backgrounds. .On THE Run …. in ochre, . SheepFox . in neon orange, or the marbled effect depicting a jungle animal fur for the variations on “Wuu” offer these examples. Unlike King’s animals that seems to be in a perpetual adventure, these animals spell out anxiety, aloofness, and their “boneless” quality is closer to that of an imagined taxidermy. Each one is mostly alone in composition; we feel the need to hug these comfort animals to animate them. .. Wuuhug .. is the exception and shows us the example. King’s animals spell out strength, movement, and spontaneity in their mysterious clusters.

Playdate is a suitable title as the conversation between these two works lets us enter the world of the child, almost always inhabited by animals, as this allows for children to feel comfort, make their first friends, and form imaginary relationships and stories with these characters as plush animals or cartoons or visits to the zoo. In our early years, it is often through them that we start to observe and experience the world and our relation to it. Pictorially, King remained an artist as she grew up, her images giving us keys into nonverbal expression, connecting us to her in the present through forms, colors, and shapes from the imagination or recognizable in pop culture. It is up to us as the audience to learn to recognize where artistic expression lies so we can continue to open the canon, our eyes, and expand our expectation of what moves us in visual art and where to find it.