The Brooklyn Rail

In this expansive exhibition of recent mixed-media works, Marta Thoma Hall sets imaginative fire to fields of corn. The corn of which I speak resides in some of the outlandish materials that she employs, including convoluted driftwood, large seashells, and crass artificial fur, all abject if not outrightly despised. But as the saying goes, art is not about the materials that an artist uses. Instead, it is about what that artist does with those materials, and Thoma Hall does a lot with the diverse materials that she works with, activating them in ways that dramatically disrupt the sentimental associations that they might trigger. She does this in a forthright and guileless way, eschewing Pop-inspired irony while reviving and celebrating an older Surrealist aspiration to attain the treasured state of marvelousness valorized by André Breton. For both Breton and Thoma Hall, fever dreams were and are at the center of their artistic process and at the forefront of their work.

The twenty-five works (all 2024) included here divide between two and three-dimensional constructions, with many hybrids of both. The large two-dimensional works can be called collage paintings, oftentimes featuring gestural torrents of richly saturated acrylic and water-based oil paint. In a few of these, such as Ge Danced a Goldfish, reflective mica is added to the paint describing a ghostly fish leaping into an aqueous picture space encroached upon by a large swath of faux fur. In Ge as Dreamer, we see a ghostly grisaille figure lurking like a wisp of smoke in a vertiginous composition dominated by a deep blue semi-figural shape. Here, too, the image is further enlivened by the addition of faux fur shapes that seem to spill out of clouds of loosely applied paint. Other two-dimensional works feature collage elements that are quite subtle. For example, in Walk Away, we immediately notice a grisaille image of a woman’s long legs stepping away from the viewer, but it takes time to see how the composition is flanked by upside down fragments torn from a reproduction of a Vincent van Gogh landscape.

The stunning deep blue colors visible in some of the paintings can also be found in some of the free-standing sculptures. In Mystery of Ge, we see an arch formed from a cascading tumult of unicorns made from cast epoxy resin, patinaed with an iridescent blue. A similar figure titled Young Ge, also cast from epoxy resin sports another blue patina, this one presented amid a tangle of driftwood that seems to transform into a constricting snake that is about to devour it like a latter day Laocoon. In the smaller Beloved Creature Ge, we see a different kind of patina, gold flecks dusted onto a dark grey female figure holding a huge brain atop her head as her lower body transforms into a tangle of octopus-like tentacles. In Get Entangled,what appears to be serpentine spinal structure spirals out of what seems to be a cracked wooden egg.

Thoma Hall’s hybrid constructions are suffused with an archeological romance that imagines a magical reanimation of seemingly (un)dead or otherwise forlorn forms, showing how they are haunted by their past lives. In some ways, they are reminiscent of the work that Damien Hirst scandalously presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale (collectively titled Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable), except that Hirst’s over-the-top mimics of archeological form proved to be under-the-bottom attempts at satire of archeological commodity fetishism, all too snide and far too grandiose for their own good. In Thoma Hall’s work, the re-conjurations of bygone form have a very different fetishistic quality, echoing the way that some ritual objects come across as having a quasi-magical power over reality. They also point to how the artist seems to believe, sincerely, that they have that kind of power, seducing their viewers into fantasy worlds of uncanny possibility.