Eamon Ore-Giron, “Talking S--- with Viracocha's Rainbow ,” 2023. NEW YORK — In terms of persuasive art by grown-up artists, this year’s Whitney Biennial — the 81st iteration of this closely watched survey of contemporary art — may be the best in more than a decade. But that, frankly, is a low bar. Compared with previous editions, this show groans with good work. But it is also — true to form — about 50 percent dross.
The stars of the show, which is titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” are video artists, painters and sculptors. Their works, which sprawl across two entire floors of the museum, spilling over into spaces on other floors, provoke reactions more visceral and psychological than preeningly ideological. They are by artists who grasp the weight of things. They’re attentive to materials and dynamics and to the various ways in which objects and images can charge the spaces around them.
She has combined them into a sculptural environment laid out on a plastic tarp in a large gallery on the museum’s entrance level. A few semi-inflated shiny balloon letters are dispersed on the floor. A mirrored disco ball perches atop an overturned shopping cart balanced on a piece of gym equipment.
I admired, too, the sculptures of Jes Fan, which are made from 3D-printed CT scans of the artist’s knee, hip muscles and vertebrae. He combines these organic-looking forms with blobs of clear, handblown glass. Fan evokes the body by displacing it. B. Ingrid Olson and K.R.M. Mooney do something similar, Olson with immaculately crafted forms that are like containers for body parts; Mooney with fascinating wall sculptures made from steel electroplated with silver.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s paintings are in the former category. The best of them, painted more than 40 years ago, was inspired by a sighting of whales off the coast of San Francisco. Active in the civil rights movement, Lovelace O’Neal has long made work in which racial politics were embedded, even when that work was abstract. But the whale sighting triggered a different kind of response. It prompted her to “imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace” when mating.
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