The "Domestic Horror" exhibition, organized by Bill Powers is presented by Gagosian New York. On display works by Natalie Ball, Louise Bonnet, Ginny Casey, Genieve Figgis, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Tanya Merrill, Cheikh Ndiaye, Rene Ricard, Pauline Shaw, Lucien Smith (with Glenn O'Brien), Vaughn Spann and Chloe Wise. Featuring a number of young and emerging artists, this exhibition includes many specially commissioned works.
The word "domestic" holds a powerful double meaning here, alluding to the unintended consequences that can occur – in private life and in wider social and cultural life – where internalized anxieties meet external pressures.
Ndiaye and Spann navigate the perils of political turmoil by upending familiar images of cultural stability: the office space of Senegal's state newspaper, in shambles after an anti-government protest; an American flag, deconstructed and reassembled with a single ominous, looming star. Working with structures of concealment and visibility, Figgis and Juszkiewicz construct surreal and uncomfortable scenes of physical and social suppression. Figgis' ghoulish, psychedelic painting of a well-dressed family pokes fun at the ritual of aristocratic portraiture, while Juszkiewicz parodies Louis Léopold Boilly's portrait of Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier in a landscape (1807) by smothering the titular subject with fabric and foliage wrapped around her head.
As a subversive nod to the tradition of depicting dead game in academic still life painting, Merrill's Cat with Eel and Snail (2019) instead imagines a moment in which the artist's subjects break free from a carefully composed picture. Merrill reanimates the once lifeless forms of the cat, eel, and snail, allowing them to inflict their inherently violent tendencies on one another. While Merrill's subject matter and muted color palette make for a grim reminder, his loose, irregular brushstrokes infuse the scene with a very lively, frenetic energy.
Vibrant with physiological drama, the fleshy, fabric-draped forms of Bonnet's Interior with Pink Blanket (2019) exaggerate the contours of the human body to the limits of recognizability. Its haunting composition suggests that in everyday life only the thinnest veneer of estates masks the grotesque from view.
