Chicken or Beef

New York City

Chicken or Beef? is a museum-style transatlantic survey of figurative painting in Europe and America, named after the ubiquitous question posed on transatlantic flights.

As opposed to creating two camps at odds, the show instead highlights the many similarities of approach, not just between the two regions but also between the more prominent artists in the group and their more emerging counterparts. The comic outlines and slapstick nudity of a Todd James painting appear in a Misaki Kawai work as well; Cecily Brown’s joyous brushstrokes find a counterpart in the abstracted opulence in Rosson Crow’s funerary flowers; Tal R’s circus figures and reduced palette resonate with young artist Keegan McHargue’s pastelled acrobats; and many more complementary themes that the viewer will enjoy discovering for themselves.

Despite how international the art world has become — not just art fairing, but internetting and institutional exchanging — the show hints at some regional differences in approach. Perhaps we confront the work with the stereotype that European painting is more conceptual or more academic; perhaps American painters are more iconoclastic and irreverent. After all, each region has their own gods in their own pantheons of figuration and certainly different teachers at their academies of higher learning. Daniel Richter guides grad students in Vienna while Cecily Brown and David Salle have consulted those at Yale for example. It would be hard to point out in words just what these regional differences might be, though such distinctions may appear to emerge when experiencing these artworks throughout the same gallery space.

Participating artists include Allison Schulnik, Anders Oinonen, Anna Bjerger, Antonio Ballester Moreno, Barnaby Furnas, Bjarne Melgaard, Cecily Brown, Dan Attoe, Devoin Troy Strother, Eddie Martinez, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Erik Parker, Geoff McFetridge, HuskMitNavn, Jannis Varelas, Jemima Kirke, Jocelyn Hobbie, John Copeland, John Korner, Jules de Balincourt, Katherine Bernhardt, Keegan McHargue, Lola Schnabel, Margaret Kilgallen, Maya Bloch, Miriam Cahn, Misaki Kawai, Peter Linde Busk, Rosson Crow, Ryan Schneider, Tal R, Taylor McKimens, Todd James and Troels Carlsen.

The Hole NYC

March 6 – April 20, 2013
312 Bowery
New York, NY 10012
USA

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