It’s understandable that Lara Schnitger would want to move on after a decade of making her signature anthropomorphic bundles of wood and fabric. Too bad the three new sculptures in her latest solo show outshine the main offering, a series of lackluster fabric-on-canvas “paintings.” Wittily evoking recognizable character types like a glitzy matron or glamorous belle of the ball, the sculptures are suggestive and humorous while the paintings rely too heavily on contrasting patterns and colors.
Not that Schnitger’s use of materials is unappealing, as attested to by one arresting portrait of a mother with a glowing mass of orange hair and a nude body rendered in crags of bleached black fabric. Elsewhere, a stately Morticia Addams type flashes a leg from beneath a black, lace-stenciled dress while almost incidentally holding a tiny baby. Neither piece packs the punch of Schnitger’s earlier photocollages of babies with porn actresses, nor makes substantial comment on sexuality and motherhood.
Gratuitously erotic images—a bottom in the air, an anorexic onanist—and darkly symbolic pairings of women with cats or a crow have purely aesthetic purpose, though a more ambitious, bestial remake of Bronzino’s racy ‘An Allegory with Venus and Cupid’ avoids the anonymity of the other paintings’ mask-faced characters.
By contrast, Schnitger’s wry sculptural figures are the life of the party: A pointy armature on a pedestal becomes a big-busted grande dame in a gaudy getup, a skinny character in lingerie seems to trip over her own kinky outfit, and a stork-legged starlet struts in stilettos and a magnificently gaudy ball gown.