Lara Schnitger @ Anton Kern

Lara Schnitger's current show at Anton Kern is a gothic perversion of the already perverse Baroque. The presentation features creepy paintings, unstable sculptures, and a flawlessly executed web that catches the works like flies in a trap.

Schnitger is perhaps best known for her fabric constructions that are part fantastic dada, part Surrealist uncanny, and part Snuffleupagus. They hulk and tower like the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. The work on view, Azurite Folly (2009) is part peacock, part starry night, part carnival tent, and part oven mitt.

The paintings range from pretty to disturbing. Woman with a Crow (2009), Schnitger's recasting of Picasso's eponymous work gives the composition an ethereal, magical quality. Instead of presenting simplicity and a sense of the earthy, this work is a study in delicacy. The crow becomes a landscape of the night and the woman's shoulder is cast as intricate doily. But Cupidity (After Bronzino) (2009), in its redressing of Bronzino's sexually-inflected work as an orgy of animality, is a little obvious in its modern transposition of an Allegory of Lust (what the National Gallery calls An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, 1540-50).








The best part of the exhibition is the installation, for which Schnitger has created a black snowflake web that references the theme of femininity pervasive through the works on view through its material: hosiery.