Nicola Tyson
Two Figures Jumping, 1997, oil and
charcoal on canvas, 72 x 66 in.
© ArtNet Worldwide 1997
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david ebony's
new york top ten
nicola tyson
at friedrich petzel
Mar. 15-Apr. 19, 1997
In this show Nicola Tyson
presented seven large recent
paintings in which she seems to
fulfill her promise as a painter
destined to keep alive a certain
kind of figuration that many
feared might have died with
Francis Bacon. It's not that her
work closely resembles that of
Bacon -- it doesn't, except for a
shared interest in compositions
featuring a single centralized,
extremely distorted figure set
against monochrome grounds. It's
just that Tyson is not afraid to
take chances with the figure.
In Figure on All-Fours, for
instance, a bright blue creature
seems to be in the throes of some
terrible mutation. Its stomach has
turned into an elongated form that
resembles a pitcher handle. In two
self-portraits, with brightly
colored backgrounds, one yellow,
one red, Tyson depicts herself as
a puppet-like figure, encased in a
kind of suffocating sheath, her
eyes peering cautiously out into
space.
Sometimes, Tyson hints at a Hans
Bellmer-esque perversity in her
work, most notably in this show's
canvas titled Figure on Tiled
Floor, in which a phallic shape
juts out from a truncated torso.
At other times, she produces works
of surprising delicacy, such as
the unusual double figure study
titled, Two Figures Jumping. In
this elegant, symmetrical
composition, sleek, faceless
figures float in a sea of green.
Like seahorses metamorphosing into
ballerinas, these figures are
denizens of a world ruled by
Tyson's fertile imagination.
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