Rob Pruitt’s “Multiple Personalities” includes a room of love seats and standing tabletops layered in wild doodles by his studio assistants (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Gavin Brown’s enterprise
620 Greenwich St.
Through Saturday, October 25, free, 10:00 am- 6:00 pm
212-627-5258
www.gavinbrown.biz
Rob Pruitt displays the profuse output of his mind and the many sides of his artistic vision in “Multiple Personalities,” continuing through October 25 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. The DC-born, New York City-based provocateur has divided the solo show into four distinct parts. In the front office, a year of framed monthly calendars feature notes and drawings for every day, from birthday reminders to deadlines to the release of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, complete with a miniature version of the title object. The next room is filled with Ikea love seats (displayed atop black-and-white tiled bases) and standing tabletops that have been completely covered by Pruitt’s studio assistants with colorful doodles and sayings, a wry and often goofily pornographic take on pop culture and societal norms that features various familiar cartoon figures, Hollywood celebrities, and politicians engaging in wild sex (don’t miss Bart Simpson, Ned Flanders, Beavis and Butt-Head, and the Pink Panther in a chain next to John and Yoko) as well as tributes to Cy Twombly, Pop Rocks, and Pruitt and longtime partner Jonathan Horowitz.
Cats are hanging around Rob Pruitt’s latest show at Gavin Brown, which includes his “Therapy” and “Suicide” paintings (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In the third room, several of Pruitt’s acrylic on linen “Suicide Paintings” hang on white walls, with Hamptons sand forming a small shore around them. The gradient works, in shades of blue, green, and purple, are a kind of melding of Mark Rothko (who committed suicide) with James Turrell and Hiroshi Sugimoto (who are both very much alive), like peaceful, inviting windows onto the sea. In the final room, small cats are checking out Pruitt’s “Therapy Paintings,” large canvases based on automatic-writing doodles the artist made during therapy sessions, using ballpoint pens and then blown up onto canvases primed with white impasto. With “Multiple Personalities,” Pruitt, who’s been hosting “Rob Pruitt’s Art Awards” at the Guggenheim since 2009 and whose “Andy Monument,” a silver sculpture of Andy Warhol, graced Union Square back in 2011, has created an impressive display of his wide-ranging talent, ingenuity, and, of course, unique sense of humor.