REVIEWS NICOLA TYSON
NICOLA TYSON
FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY, NEW YORK
4 MAY – 16 JUNE
Even though all of Nicola Tyson’s paintings are seeded from pencil
drawings in her sketchbook, some of those drawings graduate to
paintings and others stay put. The latter are ‘complete’ in themselves,
Friedrich Petzel’s publicity insisted, and remarkably, this brief survey
of six years of pictures from Tyson’s sketchbook seemed to bear that
out. It leaves one wondering what qualities might dif_f erentiate the
drawings that are reused from those that are not, and one has to
conclude that the bounty the latter possess is a quality of ideal un-
specifi city. Tyson’s paintings have always been populated by mutant
Untitled (sketch book page) #35, amalgams that straddle all categories of zoological possibility, but these drawings are the pinnacle of the
2006, graphite on paper, 27 x 21 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Friedrich unnameable, spaced out across the gallery with a hilarious sense of uncertainty about mood and genre, animal,
Petzel Gallery, New York vegetable and mineral: farmyard comedy and shady landscapes here, dogs and dog-forms there, moments of
womanhood gathered elsewhere and gothic things with pincers and gaping mouths someplace else. All the
pictures are untitled, and it is hardly surprising.
Tyson’s work has so often seemed to make a powerful address to themes, and has seemed to dialogue
with all kinds of infl uences, from Nancy Spero to Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon to Giacometti, that it’s
remarkable to see with what fl ickering uncertainty her imagery evolves. There are no ghostly pentimenti in her
drawings, no rubbings-out and repositionings; her hand defi nes a plane, wavers a moment, then ranges across
the page once more to defi ne another. Indeed, it seems that Tyson starts out with little more than the fi gment
of an idea before, as Klee put it, just ‘taking a line for a walk’. And (armchair shrinks will be delighted to learn)
that walk returns, with eerie regularity, to the mouth. While some artists waver over hands, Tyson just doesn’t
know where to put an orifi ce. One fi gure, almost-human, with arms outstretched, has had its mouth described
so many times that it has become like a fat, tentacular coil of muscle. Another creature, a round penguin with
breasts, has three or more faintly drawn mouth-possibilities. And one drawing of a woman – maybe dark-
skinned, maybe masked – has a mouth that is merely a small slit at the bottom of a larger circle of white; a mouth
within a mouth.
These pictures hold creatures that are not too undeveloped to make it beyond the page; rather, they
hold creatures that have developed too far. When they are fl awed it is because they are overloaded and blurred,
when they are perfect it is because they have been consummately realised within the medium of drawing.
That they have made it into the gallery at all is surely thanks to Tyson calling a halt only just in time.
Morgan Falconer
ARTREVIEW one.linthree.lintwo.lin
p123-137 Reviews AR Jul07.indd 132 5/6/07 12:34:26
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