The Brooklyn Rail

Days of Awe is the resounding title of Susan Bee’s latest solo show at A.I.R. (she’s had eleven there to date, like a long-running mini-series, the next installment of which is eagerly awaited). While you can’t judge a show by its title, this one is particularly timely, with its apocryphal reverberations, its meaning gyrating between a best-of-times, worst-of-times scenario, depending on who’s doing the spin. (Many of us, however, will be forgiven in thinking that the world is tilting, or rather, being tilted, recklessly, disastrously toward the latter. Its actual source, however, is the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, designated as days of repentance and atonement, of fasting and forgiveness for the past year’s transgressions, considered the holiest days in the Jewish calendar. Days of Awe (2023), the exhibition’s title painting, is Bee’s subversive take on her religious traditions, in which she pays tribute to her heritage while departing from its orthodoxies. The scene—a medieval village, a shtetl, surrounded by Christian saints and icons—is the site of a vigorously contested battle between sharp-clawed demons and heavenly creatures, between good and evil, the ritual referring to texts extracted from the Kabbalah and other mystical writings.

Bee, known for her enthusiastic, canny rummaging through multiple cultures, also introduces a group of new paintings here, inspired by her trip to Rajasthan last year. The trip was illuminating, Bee beguiled by the abundance of color everywhere: the architecture, textiles, jewels, spices, and, of course, the art, from exquisite miniatures to murals to the rougher creations of folk art. The iconography and stories of Indian Buddhism and Hindu mythologies also captivated her in a more focused way while there not as a scholar, she points out, but as an artist, her response intuitive, adapting what she learned for her own purposes. Color, she noted, is a universal communicator, conveying the meaning of her paintings even when words hit a language barrier.

The show includes three other bodies of recent work, and, once again, highlights her ingenuity in interweaving a richly eclectic trove of mythological, folk, and religious imagery from different periods and cultures together, always with the valorizing of women in mind, as well as touching on environmental and other current social issues.

Countryside Trimurti (2024) is one of the paintings in the Rajasthan series that includes such Hindu deities as Kali, Durga, and Ganesha, re-envisioned, often portrayed with greater benignity, even humor, domestication. Here, Hinduism’s supreme gods—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—are configured as a single entity in the Trimurti, re-cast as a kind of country squire, beneath a schematized tree with a characteristic all-seeing apotropaic eye to ward off evil. The colors dance, the drawing has the immediacy and bewitching naivete of a child’s view of the world, a rare feat to pull off in adulthood, as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse both admitted, regretting the loss of that simplicity. In Bee’s bright green paradise of birds and nestlings, flowers and trees, lakes and mountains, a radiant orange sun triumphantly breaks through the clouds. Yet despite that, there is, perhaps, a darker presence in this Edenic setting: a serpent. Is it poised to strike or not?

Pastorale (2024), on the other hand, is not sourced in any specific references. Its saturated, high intensity colors (turquoise, fuchsias, oranges, yellows, crimsons), are one of the painting’s great delights. Bee, a natural colorist, pushes her palette’s spectrum toward the psychedelic, as is often noted. There is also a snake in residence here, but it seems more like a pet than venomous, protecting the winged heroine who stands beneath a tree that whimsically blooms with a pierced heart and red lips, one of the many works on view that brims with the joie de vivre of color and image.

The Egg and I (2024), which Bee amusingly calls a self-portrait (it’s also a generalized caricature of women) pictures an egg with a face peering out of it and two legs dangling from it, sitting on what might be a tuffet. The background is sketchy, expressionistic, the patterning jagged, the landscape broody, the sky green with what seems to be a dark moon, reminiscent of Giorgione’s The Tempest (well, a little). Yet she is no Humpty Dumpty; I’ll bet on her to not fall, and if to fall, to be able to pick up all the pieces with panache, as women have done for millennia.

Despite the apocalyptic title, Bee’s show is bracingly down-to-earth and restorative, the mix intoxicating, uplifting. Surely that’s something most of us can use right now.