AFTER praised the outings in LA and Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas arrived at the Hayward Gallery with a roar. It is the roar of the body-slam of a wrestler or a diva’s ovation-throat, successful, silent. Thomas’s exhibition is everything, and it is also attractive, opening a room with a huge picture of black women. All painted on panels with rounded corners – no frame enclosed This Woman.
Working from the presented photographs and found images, Thomas’s compositions are excessive hymns. Figures appear in fragments from pattern layers, such as swirling kimonos who do not reveal to show body parts in Japanese wooden wood. The bodies themselves are radically -fralated, given in simplified graphic forms such as Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes in 1960. But unlike those nudes, Thomas’ numbers have names, and Eyes, and agencies. The naked ones on a couch covered with florals and animal prints, the woman in a small taste outside of Love (2007) was identified as the ex -girlfriend of the artist Maya.
In navigating the territory between joy and sadness, Thomas had two great weapons at his disposal: rhinestones and Eartha Kitt. A liberal crust of the former gives the flat paintings depth and movement. With Mama Bush: (Your love continues to lift me up) higher and higher, violets and indigo feature a sparkle from the artist’s rhinestone. Her smile reflects on such a shimmer that you can hardly focus on. A recent painting of a medical student who is also called dances before your eyes on the Iridescent Starbursts.
Thomas reflects the way black women picture – or not. Got in the margins of historic paintings, naked and available as “strange” objects of desire, conquering their accepted duties as performers. Rhinestones are created to dazzle under the electric light and create sight on stage. They dressed in bodies that move for fun and recreation. By applying them to a fixed surface, Thomas makes the viewer do the work. The women in her paintings will not go. We have to move to make them sparkle.
Two devastating works are soundtracked by the Eartha Kitt. To me as Muse (2016), a bank of TV screens between patterns and body parts, slowly reveal the reclining nude form of Thomas himself. The audio was an interview with the BBC in which Kitt described his family, his first years of service and abuse, and the love that avoided him: “Many men want to lie down on me, But no one wants you to raise me. “
In an adjacent gallery, four screens show Kitt singing Angelitos Negros next to Thomas and two other women, who are stylish and filmed as if everyone were playing in 1960. Their voices were Asking an actor to paint black angels in an interior in the church and break the customary description of heaven as a literal zone of white high -power. Kitt was crying as he sang. Thomas, the painter, receives his challenge, filling the gallery with high numbers.
This exhibition borrows its title from American Scholar Bell Hooks’ All About Love (1999), which argues the importance of love, sacred, familiar, social or romantic. Hayward is taken with domestic furniture, disco music, shrines full of favorite books and even shag carpeting, Thomas makes space for the close of all kinds. For the hooks, the invitation to love the love has had a political importance: “I feel our country’s abandonment of love so much that I feel so abandoning my childhood.” It was a feeling that became more slippery 25 years after writing it.
The risk is smiling, an exhibition of Linder, the photocollage’s scalpel-wielding post-punk queen, runs at once. The juxtapos is superficial: Thomas is glitzy exuberance; Linder, cool surgical. Thomas is huge. Linder is often confined to the sizes of the magazine where he cut the cut. However the pairing proves to be surprisingly canny. Both artists are involved in avoiding the feminine image. Both work with soft porn and fashion photographs. Both use their own body – the linder flexed his back muscles and dons by a boxer’s boxer; Thomas appears in a tiger print leotard performing wrestling maneuvers.
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Like Thomas, Linder’s work is often cooperating, and the importance of friendships and family connections is apparent, whether he is designing album covers for pals or taking photos in the backstage. A suite of works in which ballet positions are interrupted by strange undersea creatures are made, Linder’s notes, as he cares for his older parents. Self-portraits in which he appears to be covered with colored goo are associated not only with a fetish known as “sploshing” but also in soft foods where adults can be spoonful .
The best works here are a deceptive simple marriage of two unspecified elements matched. A woman leaning to hug a man instead of jaming a fork in her eye. A “perfect” Aryan athlete changes with a piece of industrial tool. Nudes airbrushed with marmoreal smoothness sprout crystal protuberances. It is the work of massive restraint. The results are often brutal.
