A show that’s probably more interesting for its location (Park Avenue and 75th Street) than for its contents, “Domestic Horror” features a dozen artists who are, with one or two exceptions, fresh out of graduate school. Most of what’s on view consists of the sort of painting you often encounter at Lower East Side galleries: figurative, funky and wearing its stylistic influences on its sleeve. Still, this ain’t the LES, and the shingle outside reads GAGOSIAN, a gallery not given to exhibiting work that hasn’t yet hit the $1 million mark.
As curated by art-world talent scout and gallerist Bill Powers, the exhibit has something to do with the tensions between the raw of human behavior and the cooked of societal constraints. More likely, Powers is simply indulging a personal taste for artists who share an aesthetic of abjection—though one careful not to seem too confrontational or innovative.
Louise Bonnet’s lumpy, cartoonish canvas, for example, depicts a couple fumbling under the covers, seemingly in flagrante but maybe not; it could easily be mistaken for a Peter Saul, as indeed it was by another visitor in the gallery. Ewa Juszkiewicz and Genieve Figgis both trash Old Master conventions—Juszkiewicz, by wrapping the heads of her classical-style portrait subjects in fabric, hair or leaves; Figgis, by reprising canonical works with figures that look like melted candles—while Pauline Shaw presents a multicolor tapestry that looks like it was made of dryer lint.
Ultimately, the horror of the title, whatever it’s meant to suggest, is more domesticated than domestic: a pantomime of transgression masquerading as the real thing.