NEW YORK: Christa Maiwald at Florence Lynch - formerly ArtNation Projects

Art in America, June, 1999 by Cathy Lebowitz

Christa Maiwald's recent oil paintings and gouache drawings, collectively titled "Learn to Draw," offer comic scenarios, often depicting instances of artistic coercion. Sometimes the pictured events are summed up by their titles: the teacher scolds the child in You Better Learn to Draw!, the aspiring artist faces a gallery's rejection in Sorry Nudes Are Out, Bugs Are In. Reflecting Maiwald's earlier history as a videomaker (her video Building a Nuclear Head was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial), the medium-size cartoon-paintings are contained within a monitor-shaped area; she leaves a thin border around a black rectangular delineation.

In the gouache-and-oil-crayon drawing, Don't Do This/Do That (1997), two mountainous landscapes in markedly different styles are shown on a vertically divided page. The first is a red, yellow, blue, green and brown flat-bed space. A blue tree is cropped by the paper's top and bottom. The other is a perspectival tonal drawing that embodies the step-by-step instructions of the late Jon Gnagy, a TV art teacher that the gallery press release says Maiwald watched as a child. In fact, Gnagy's lessons on how to make "convincing" images can still be found on a memorial Web site.

The oil paintings are primarily black and white. In I'm the Artist, She's My Model, the scene is an art opening. A woman with two heads, two torsos and three legs is seen talking to another woman holding a cocktail glass. The title refers to the character's literal split identity as artist and model. The character's disturbed nature is further established by pictures on the wall that show her holding a large knife. Here and elsewhere, the title, used like a caption, has so much to do with the painting that the work might have been more effective if the canvas incorporated the text.

In You Better Learn to Drawl (1997), a small child in a classroom lined with children at easels is confronted by a shrewish teacher with a masklike face, a distorted hunch back and Medusalike hair. Maiwald's cartoon style engages with aspects of abstract picture-making in a black arch that seems both to be part of the wall and to form the teacher's back. Throughout this exhibition, Maiwald seems to delight in a certain kind of dark humor, one which perhaps expresses her frustrations with being an artist.