The Brooklyn Rail

In schips, we meet a bunch of paintings by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Fox Hysen. Every painting is deeply rooted in unflinching devotion—to processing, to the unplanned, to rupture and repair, and to painting itself. And each piece is unmistakably traceable to each artist, specific and distinctive. No question as to who made what.

These paintings are urgent pleas for survival, exploring the rocky terrain of surface, texture, humor, loss, and perseverance. These bodies of work—visual feasts—offer a peek into two sharp nervous systems, two people investigating the parameters of staying alive by painting through the clarity and the muck.

Hysen’s work consistently contends with the rectangle, mostly oil, mostly on linen. Lines have minds of their own. Real guts to them. And a real air. A resilience. Impossible maps. Charting the invisible and thickly lived.

In Hysen’s good day (2024), I see a scraping, a clawing, an imprinting into a built-up surface packed with many lives lived. Variations of the grid cut right through the flat, fleshy surface built up through obsessive touch. I feel a history of experiments, inconsistencies, tremors. We are trying on resolutions and seeing how they fit. Bodies redistribute and elastic can’t keep up. We adapt. We lay down in the sun. Earthy, sandy tones as primordial as it gets. In between corners and bruises, good day contains the history of the world.

Zuckerman-Hartung’s bombastic paintings incorporate mixed media (wood, eye hooks, fabric, found objects), and often disregard the “stretcher” and boundary altogether. Colors are vivid, things are hammered halfway. Analogous phenomena side-by-side.

In Unbegotten (2024), Zuckerman-Hartung composes a painting of acrylic and embroidery thread on linen. These are not the sutures that dissolve in your gums. In it for the long haul, even though we could pull out all the verticals with just one tug. Don’t move too quickly or breathe too hard. Different greens spill and bleed, composing flexible horizontals perpendicular to the four and a half pillars made of string. More approximate parallels of clear, fresh linen sandwiching the green ones. The X and Y axes play-wrestle. Provoke and resist. Upfront evidence of human touch all over the place. I’m impulsive and refined, I spill over and I edit. There are holes in the walls. Not from neglect, but to show us the history of second chances.

These paintings overflow with the stories of their making. Rolling forward and rerouting. Tripping, hiccuping, and ironing your pants. These are two bodies of work hanging together and sharing walls. Two universes, both entrenched to an electrifying degree, in their commitments to discovering wildly new approaches to invention and survival through their poetic and monumental processes. A victory.