Installation view of "Yours Truly". Photo by Tom Powel Imaging.
By Andrew Russeth and Yinka Elujoba
Jam-packed group shows with quirky conceits are an enduring (and endearing) tradition of the New York summer, though they felt thin on the ground this year. Fortunately the art adviser Eleanor Cayre stepped up to curate “Yours Truly,” a rollicking exhibition of recent self-portraits by more than 50 artists, at Nahmad Contemporary.
Chino Amobi, a musician and artist, gazes out of a vivid oil painting the size of a sheet of paper, while a young Jordan Wolfson is being embraced by his father in a tender snapshot affixed to an egg-shaped hunk of brass. Emily Sundblad sits nude and visibly pregnant in a spare canvas, still a rare subject a century after Paula Modersohn-Becker painted herself that way, perhaps the first such depiction in Western art.
Since most of these pieces were created in the last few years, the show amounts to a behind-the-scenes group portrait. Carolyn Lazard is in bed, on her laptop, in a pen drawing; Danielle Mckinney is in bed, sleeping, in an oil painting.
Other portraits are less candid but not necessarily less revealing. A charismatic pig stars in an immense image by the roguish photographer Heji Shin, and Joel Mesler has a slapdash painting of a dejected clown. The show’s cumulative effect is moving, as so many people decide how to present themselves while we look on.
Henry Taylor steals the show, as he so often does. Here he is floating in a pool in a radiant painting that was turned into a mural on the High Line in 2017. He is wearing sunglasses, leaning back on fluorescent-green pool noodles, and it looks like summer is never going to end.