Cary Leibowitz: Prequel Nyquil
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS West at Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, Gallery 106, San Francisco
January 12 – 28, 2017
For decades, Leibowitz has been the New York art world’s master painter of abjection and neuroses, with mockingly self-abasing work that mixes elements of therapy, interrogation, social and institutional critique, and stand-up comedy routine. In both his cheeky multiples and his irregular-format paint-on-wood “text” works, Leibowitz turns a critical eye on subjects of identity, modernism, the art market, queer politics, and kitsch—making the gestures and reflexes of self-doubt and social skepticism into pictures of self-awareness as a theater (or satire? Or both?) of radical and universal vulnerability.
Leibowitz first came to prominence in the early 1990s, as Candyass, a prankster-critic of neo-expressionist grandiosity—and one whose self-mocking good humor belied a universe of anxiety below the surface, particularly as the AIDS crisis devastated both New York and San Francisco. (As critic Hilton Als has pointed out, his nickname was “yet another means of deflecting criticism.”) With uproarious text paintings of self-lacerating one-liners, typically composed against pastel-colored wood “canvases,” Leibowitz was celebrated as a wry and disconsolate Abject Art witness to the new pop-spectacle of the later 1990s and 2000s. But his work was also and always deeply personal and idiosyncratic, driven by anxieties, neuroses, and premonitions of difference that transform self-doubt and social skepticism into something much larger than niche art-world critique. That is, a heartrending and intimate meditation on our inescapable secret doubleness—the debilitatingly self-aware conscience that lies always beneath, or behind, or just around the corner, with a mocking and knowing wink.
