This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Ceija Stojka\u2019s na\u00efve expressionism, Mao Ishikawa\u2019s sprawling bodies and a redo of an important show by Peter Hujar.<\/p>\n
Soho<\/p>\n
Ceija Stojka<\/p>\n
Through June 7. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.<\/p>\n
Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) was born to a family of Lovari Roma horse traders in southern Austria and ultimately settled in Vienna, where she made a living for many years as a rug dealer. Her memoir of surviving Nazi concentration camps, published in 1988 and followed by two others, caused a sensation in a country not known for its alacrity in reckoning with its past. After it came out, Stojka began making drawings and paintings<\/a> of her memories, too \u2014 colorful, highly expressive depictions that are at once magnetic and impossible to resolve.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that they aren\u2019t clear. The barbed wire, the skeletal prisoners, the blowing grasses and the fields of glowing sunflowers are all unmistakable. But Stojka painted with such na\u00efve expressionist gusto that the painting itself, insofar as you can judge it separately from its subject matter, is thrilling. The faces recall the caricatures of George Grosz, or the cartoons of Quentin Blake, while Stojka\u2019s application of color has the intuitive force and perfection of a well-loved folk song.<\/p>\n Of course in that very contradiction \u2014 of anger and hatred set against love and delight \u2014 Stojka evokes, with unusual lucidity, the violence of the camps themselves. In an ink drawing titled \u201cFinal liquidation in Auschwitz, August 1944. We fell through their nets,\u201d a crowd of grinning Nazi soldiers, many raising rifles and bayonets, looms over a winding line of smaller inmates. Above them, rises, somehow, a bright yellow sun.<\/p>\n Chelsea<\/p>\n Mao Ishikawa<\/p>\n Through June 6. Alison Bradley Projects, 526 West 26th Street; 646-476-8409, alisonbradleyprojects.com.<\/p>\n Mao Ishikawa made her name in Japan with the 1982 photo book \u201cHot Days in Camp Hansen!,\u201d which documented the relationships between Black American soldiers and local young women in Okinawan bars. (Ishikawa herself, who was born in 1953, worked at a couple of these establishments.)<\/p>\n The photos aren\u2019t particularly explicit, for the most part. But they\u2019re extraordinarily carnal. Topless women drinking on the beach, a handsome soldier leaning against a jukebox in a groovy, low-cut shirt, friends talking and laughing, couples embracing \u2014 they\u2019re all most emphatically bodies, with all that implies. Sex, of course, and in this case, youth. But also presence, danger, urgency, commitment, desire and, ultimately, death.<\/p>\n \u201cMao Ishikawa: Rogue<\/a>\u201d at Alison Bradley Projects, somehow Ishikawa\u2019s first solo show in the United States, includes a number of vintage prints from that series, along with works from three others. There are candid scenes she shot on a mid-1980s trip to Philadelphia, and a later self-portrait in which she peers at the viewer around a Nikon, her hair gray and her shirt pulled up to reveal a stoma scar. (Presence and commitment continue.)<\/p>\n And then there are the portraits of Okinawan fishermen and dockworkers, which manage to combine the gritty sensuality of newsprint with time-bending rhythms of alcohol and folk culture. In one, titled \u201cA Port Town Elegy\u201d (like the rest of the series), a presumably drunken man pauses on his tiptoes, in a dance move, gazing into the camera with confusion, elation and despair.<\/p>\n Tribeca<\/p>\n Peter Hujar<\/p>\n Through May 30. Ortuzar, 5 White Street; 212-257-0033, ortuzar.com.<\/p>\n Four decades ago, at the East Village gallery Gracie Mansion, Peter Hujar staged his last photo show. A year later, in 1987, he died of AIDS at the age of 53. For that final show, Hujar arranged 70 black-and-white portraits into two long, neat rows, accomplishing the surprising feat of treating his subjects equally without leveling their differences. A dead cat in Queens and a dead man in his coffin are presented as equally worthy of close attention, as are \u201cGreer Lankton in a Fashion Pose\u201d and \u201cJohn Heys Standing Nude.\u201d<\/p>\n But while it\u2019s true that the nudes are no sexier or more vulnerable than the clothed figures, or that the performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, say, looks equally theatrical whether he is costumed as King Lear or in ordinary dress, the differences that Hujar stripped away were only the superficial ones. What he left was the raw, glowing particularity of real life in all its strangeness and resistance to generalization.<\/p>\n Reinstalled at Ortuzar gallery<\/a> in TriBeCa, which is presenting it in collaboration with the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, which showed a version last year<\/a>, the photos remain haunting. Most of Hujar\u2019s subjects look directly into the camera, and with their unrelenting charge of out-of-frame emotion, these gazes are arresting.<\/p>\n The artworks are especially impressive in the context of \u201cHow Beautiful This Living Thing Is<\/a>,\u201d a concurrent group show curated by Andrew Durbin, who just published a dual biography<\/a> of Hujar and the artist Paul Thek, his longtime friend and lover. A pair of rare Ann Wilson textiles, David Wojnarowicz\u2019s first painting, two modestly scaled works of genius by Thek and other pieces give you a sense of the dreamy, sensual, cinematic scene Hujar was working in. But his photos still resound against them all like so many claps of thunder.<\/p>\n