A view of “Al Freeman: Covers (Drawings 2023-2024) at Venus Over Manhattan, features drawings of book covers and a soft sculpture. via the artist, 56 Henry, New York, and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
Al Freeman’s “Cover (Daddy),” 2024, on view at 56 Henry. via the artist, 56 Henry, New York, and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
What To See in N.Y.C. Galleries in April: Al Freeman
by Will Heinrich
Al Freeman makes satirical, Claes Oldenburg-style sculptures of beer cans, electrical cords and other lowly objects. She finds absurd photos on the internet to juxtapose with canonical paintings that happen to be similar. But I didn’t realize until this double show of her drawings of book and album covers that she’s basically a cartoonist.
A good drawing lets you see the world not just through someone else’s eyes, but through her mind. And Freeman’s mind, it turns out, is a homespun and jokey but curiously earnest place, where the well-known artists and writers of her parents’ generation nestle together in comfortable free-for-all. Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Joan Didion’s “White Album,” Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” — Freeman’s drawings of their covers are all the same size, their edges are all a little wonky, their spines are rendered with comic-strip Cubism as stripes on the left.
Sometimes Freeman’s choice of a title — e.g., Danielle Steel’s “Daddy,” or a tattered blue Bible — seems to mean something special. Sometimes it offers the chance for her deft, charming line to “cover” someone else’s art, like Andy Warhol’s flowers, the blood vessels on the “Gray’s Anatomy” textbook, or Quentin Blake’s unforgettable illustration of the Twits.
But sometimes, as with a Japanese edition of Paul Simon’s single “You Can Call Me Al,” the only obvious significance of the subject is its very mundane specificity. It’s a grain of human experience that artist and viewer, by means of the drawing, can share.
Through May 6. Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 212-980-0700, venusovermanhattan.com.
Through May 24. 56 Henry, 56 Henry Street, Manhattan; 646-858-0800, 56henry.nyc
