“KLINE RAPE,” as this show is called, isn’t the subtlest of titles, but this isn’t the subtlest of exhibitions. Framing the titular Abstract Expressionist as a representative of modern art at its most macho, painter Rita Ackermann has layered her own gentler and more overtly erotic imagery over and under versions of Kline’s muscular gestures.
Like Jake and Dinos Chapman’s cheeky reworking of Francisco Goya’s print series “Disasters of War,” Ackermann’s project is an overt, slightly adolescent subversion of a famous original; it also has the same aura of superfluity. These paintings, which set delicate figurative traceries of pink against Franz Kline–like black, offer an immediate hit of art-historical balance redressing, but the urgency isn’t there, and the thrill doesn’t last.
Also on display is a second series, “Stretcher Bar Paintings,” in which Ackermann highlights her paintings’ underlying physical structures. Ordinarily considered a pitfall to be avoided, the tendency of stretcher bars to leave crucifixlike impressions on the surface of a canvas becomes a compositional tool here.
As in “Kline Rape,” the color scheme is all hot reds, pinks and oranges, with the painter’s slightly mangalike figures—and fragments thereof—set against splashed, scraped and scrubbed abstract fields. These passages reveal a commendable energy, but stretcher marks aside, the project as a whole feels more conventional than was perhaps intended.