Rosson Crow, After The Rapture (Border Town), 2019, acrylic, spray paint, photo transfer, oil and enamel on canvas, 96 x 144 in., 244 x 366 cm.

ARTFORUM
Reviews: Rosson Crow
By Jeffrey Kastner

Hard to believe, but sixteen years have passed since Rosson Crow’s debut at the New York gallery Canada, which announced the recently minted twenty-two-year-old BFA as a precociously talented painter. Within just a few years, she would complete an MFA at Yale University and go on to have solo exhibitions at blue-chip galleries in Paris, Los Angeles, and London before mounting a major solo show in New York (her final until recently) in 2010 with Deitch Projects during the last days of Jeffrey Deitch’s first space in SoHo. By then, Crow had developed a style in which some detected an incongruously “male” approach to content, scale, and gesture. She decided to own it, showing big, bold interior scenes that toyed with the idea of artistic masculinity by image-checking canonical dudes such as Bruce Nauman and Allen Ruppersberg—as well as peers such as Dan Colen and Dash Snow—all detourned with graffiti-like drips, smears, and splashes in a manner that evoked those macho paint flingers of yore.

Questions about “male” or “female” ways of painting today seem risible at best, and Crow’s references now are very much her own. Her canvases remain immense, but they have deepened in both formal and conceptual complexity, solidifying her reputation as a maker of history paintings that fly in the face of a moment when both history and painting seem to be on fairly shaky ground. Her tour-de-force show at the Hole on Manhattan’s Lower East Side featured ten massive works that embrace the glut and wooziness of our current era. The smallest was seven by seven feet, and the largest nearly eight by twenty. Each one was strategically gorged with objects or figures—or both—until its compositional structure began to buckle and shred, like the glitchy clipping of an overloaded amplifier.

Read the full review here.