Portfolio | New Museum

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to the New Museum, and I wanted to catch the Chris Ofili exhibit before it closed on February 1. I took only a few photographs of the exhibit because it left me underwhelmed. The new paintings seemed thin and derivative — if you create a dark room with dark paintings, they had better have the power of the Rothko Chapel — and the figural shapes reminded me of German Expressionism, but without the added richness and layering of Ofili’s earlier work with sequins, collage, and elephant dung. I did like some of the drawings, one photographed here, that were transformed into films for the big windows on the museum’s first floor. Their aqueous shapes made a nice commentary on the museum’s metal carapace. In general I thought the architecture was looking a little sad. Dirty whites, paint-crusted metal edges, the incessant dinging and scraping of the elevator in that supposedly contemplative gallery. I’ve always liked the SANAA building conceptually, but its simplicity needs upkeep.

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