"Discos and Dancers" at Picture Theory, NYC (Mar 15-May 11)
Demonic Disco, 1984
Picture Theory presents “Discos and Dancers” from the Estate of George McNeil
March 15–May 11, 2024
Opening Reception March 14, 6–8PM
Picture Theory
548 W 28th Street, Suite 238
New York, NY
“As George McNeil gets older, his work gets younger,” observed critic Michael Brenson upon seeing the 80-year-old artist’s latest work (1). Inspired by his love of movement in Balanchine and Afro-Cuban dance, the rise of MTV, and the beats of John Coltrane, the Supremes, and Tina Turner filling his studio, McNeil embarked on the most exuberant and youthful series of paintings of his career throughout the 1980s until his passing in 1995. For example, his “Disco Series,” begun in 1981, captures the raucous, rapturous energy of New York nightlife. Weightless, colorful figures float across boundless, groundless space. The push and pull of color finds analog in the oppositional tension of limbs askew, torsos off kilter, and heads inverted, evoking the transcendent euphoria of the dancefloor.
With titles like Demonic Disco, the series conjures the conspiratorial relationship between music and dance to possess all senses of the body. The dynamic, sinuous lines, acidic colors, and surging brushstrokes strive for what the artist called, “pictorial sensateness,” or sensation experienced in form. Yet in these paintings, an ambiguity and disquiet pulses beneath the manic exhilaration, fantasy, and sexuality. Disco is, after all, a solitary dance, in that bodies move alone without touching other bodies. In these crowded disco canvases, figures may overlap, but they never seem to actually touch. A self-described humanist, McNeil lends pathos to the mythological, sometimes tragic, often sensual, Dionysian tales of the New York night.
The 1980s saw the Abstract Expressionist painter fully reveal the figure that had been lurking beneath his vibrant and spontaneous impastoed abstractions in decades prior. Dancers, bathers, and other human forms began emerging from fields of color in the 1960s. By the 1980s, McNeil had introduced bold, colorful outlines to sharpen their distinction from their painterly surroundings. The figures also became less universal and more specific, referencing punk rockers, football players, or the urban types encountered on Park Place and 47th Street.
For McNeil, these later bodies of work did not mark a significant break from his early abstract compositions. In an interview, he mused that “it seems to me that my work has always had not a human figure image, but it always had a figural image. ...I’m not a figure painter at all. I’m an abstract painter where I hope that bringing in the figure brings in certain human or psychological connotations or associations, and I hope that deepens the meaning of the picture.”(2) Expressionism, above all else, is paramount.
McNeil enjoyed a late career renaissance as critics found affinities in these paintings with German Expressionism, COBRA, Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, and more contemporary developments in Neo-Expressionism and graffiti art. Yet, McNeil’s “figural images” exude a personal, empathetic, and passionate warmth unique to an artist dedicated to articulating the complexities of our inner and outer worlds. His forceful compositional choices, singular color palette, and virtuosic application of paint evidence an artist passionately driven by the endless pursuit of plastic expression.
- Kara Carmack, March 2024
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