Henry Taylor’s painting Nude descending down a staircase differs from its famous antecedents (paintings by Marcel Duchamp and Gerhard Richter) by featuring a black figure. Caught mid-step, she looks tentative and off-guard. In Jill Mulleady’s version upstairs, the figure is white, thin, upright and alien. There is much to unpack in this exhibition, which is alive with questions about race, gender and their respective representations in art history. The Schinkel Pavillon is good at this, bringing artists together in a so-called dialogue.
Taylor focuses on the continued abuses of colonialism and marginalisation, with his version of Manet’s Luncheon on the Garden serving as a thrilling highpoint. He is a great painter, with his thick, easy strokes and vivid characters.
Mulleady, perhaps, too, but she suffers a little from the inevitable comparison. Her room upstairs, with its translucent whites and reds feels raw and tender, like exposed, peeling skin. The Uruguayan-born artist has been doing her homework, as a couple of bleakly ambiguous canvases reference disturbing rape scenes from Berlin favourites, Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Dix.
A glass panopticon mirrors the shape of the room. Semi-transparent, it adds to the feeling that we’re looking where we shouldn’t, that our perception is corrupted.
★★★★
- Schinkel Pavillon, Oberwallstr. 32, Mitte, through May 19, details.
