GAGOSIAN GALLERY The landmarks on means of which Dexter Dalwood maps public a cultural landscape are the pair recognizable and disconcerting.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

The landmarks on means of which Dexter Dalwood maps public a cultural landscape are the pair recognizable and disconcerting. Paintings referring to Mao and Stalin, Bill Gates and Kurt Cobain sit alongside others devot to Patty Hearst, Ulrike Meinhof, and Brian Jone Like the paintings themselves, which depict unpopulated fantasy-bespoke interiors cobbl together from a variety of art and design sources, Dalwood's choice of iconic figures is one as well as the other utterly familiar and willfully idiosyncratic. clan who remain vivid in the popular imagination grate shoulders with others half-forgotten. This might be a question if all Dalwood were doing was name checking, on the other hand the scenes he paints are more a meditation forward representation and its inextricable relationship to absence and death than they are simple homages to or acknowledgments of the famous, the infamous, or the powerful.

Mao Tse-Tung's thought 2000, shows a cracked mire floor on which a gentle dais supports a bench and a desk Hanging in succession the black paneled wall above the desk is a small portrait of Mao vaguely reminiscent of Warhol's. upon either side of this a Chinese flag and a depressed worker's jacket suggest that Oldenburg and maybe a little Wesselmann, are being mixed in here too. The paneling itself is a straight take in succession Stella's black stripe paintings. intimations of this sort were everywhere in every part the show. The dilapidated pale mopish walls of Brian Jones' Swimming loch 2000, evoke Clyfford Still. A classic Bauhaus cantilever chair sits subordinate to the desk in Ulrike Meinhof's Bedsit, 2000 The wall in the inquiry for Patty Hearst's Apartment, 1999 is a Gerhard Richter abstraction, and the multicolored circular mat upon the chapel floor in be built up Carmel, Waco, 2000, alludes to Matisse's designs for Vence while the show outside the chapel window apes Wyeth

The general intent of Dalwood's free play with new art history is to bent holder viewers with something familiar while refusing them the satisfaction of pictorial coherence. Although Dalwood's stylistic borrowings are in each case stitched together to make a space, this space not ever manages truly to contain any of the drifts we see within it. Neither the hotline telephone forward the table in Stalin's War extent 2000, the papers on Meinhof's desk nor the cros in the Waco chapel sit in a strict sense against their backgrounds. Instead, they exist within a small trifle of some other place or of no place at all. Above and around the recognizable Seattle skyline seen between the walls of the window of Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse, 2000 for example, the firmament is a patchwork of different hippeds Trees to either side of the view indicate that it is not alone both winter and spring, on the other hand also probably somewhere other than Seattle.

Cafe Deutschland, 2000 replicates Jorg Immendorff's theater of East-West conflict however emptied of its circus of art-world figures. Beyond the tables familiar from Immendorff's paintings, the space remains divided: To the right, the curv affrays of seating in the National Assembly are clearly depicted, while to the left the seating is indistinct and informal. What get tos through in the unreconciled halves of Cafe Deutschland, as in the slippages and dislocations of Dalwood's other paintings, is that larger tension within the word representation itself: the tension between art and politics. Is all of this just a ragbag of rhetorics, Dalwood appears to be asking, or is it possible to suit to Meinhof's actions outside of their selective reproduction in Richter's paintings, and to behold something more in Hearst than her immortalization in a Cady Noland installation?

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