In Review roundup: 'Realms of Seduction,' 'For Piet’s Sake — Old and New Paintings: Robert Storr' and 'Fritz Scholder: Diversity of Brilliance'

“Realms of Seduction”

at Inhabit Galerie

CORRALES — “The Orient,” that vast region stretching from North Africa to South Asia, was “almost a European invention,” Edward Said wrote in his groundbreaking 1978 book, “Orientalism.” The idea of a Muslim world full of exotic, hypersexualized beings was always a colonialist fantasy, kept alive by centuries of European writers and artists, including Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose 1880 painting of a nude snake charmer graced Said’s book’s original cover. “Realms of Seduction,” a three-person show at Inhabit Galerie, seems intent on disrupting this Orientalist fantasy, but it’s not quite up to the task.

Let’s start with the good stuff. The centerpiece of the show is Sabra Moore’s magnificent canoe, cobbled together from scrap metal and long branches of sun-bleached wood. Moore, a criminally underrated feminist artist, also appears in the current show at Vladem Contemporary, “Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind.” I don’t know what her canoe has to do with Orientalist fantasies, but it’s a beautiful sculpture that deserves to be seen.

Petra Gupta Valentova’s dyed indigo paintings, which she sometimes makes in collaboration with rural artisans in India, are hand-embroidered with fragmentary, meandering lines that resemble geographical borders. Discontinuous and floating in a haze, these shifting lines reminded me of those in the “100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country” series by Shilpa Gupta (no relation), which make a similar point about the arbitrariness of borders in an equally poetic way. In a South Asian context, indigo is strongly associated with colonialist violence. Just think of the millions of Bengali farmers who were killed by the East India Company’s private army after the Indigo Revolt of 1859. By subtly referencing these bloody histories in a work of such seductive beauty, Gupta Valentova subverts the Orientalist myth better than the other artists in the show.

Her neon wall piece in the shape of the Taj Mahal is not nearly as interesting as her paintings — or as interesting as a lot of other Taj Mahal-themed art I’ve seen by contemporary South Asian artists — but it works as a literal sign for the show as a whole, a sort of logo. Without it, the Orientalist theme might not be legible at all.

Bill Jehle’s work is especially problematic. Jehle’s burst-like white abstractions look like obscene versions of Rajasthani tantric paintings, which were among the earliest abstract artworks in the history of the world. Far from undermining Orientalist tropes, Jehle contributes to the continued appropriation and sexualization of tantra in the West, a trend which has been widely critiqued by religious studies scholars, including Hugh Urban and Sthaneshwar Timalsina.

Jehle and Moore are both white. Gupta Valentova is ethnically Roma — Gupta is her married name — but the Roma people have deep ties to South Asia, and the fluidity and complexity of her own ethnic identity is an ongoing theme in her work. Still, it probably goes without saying that a show about Orientalism ought to include a more diverse group of artists.

Despite its shortcomings, I do recommend this show, if only because Moore and Gupta Valentova are both very good artists, and their attention to the subtleties of texture and materiality are best appreciated in person.

“Realms of Seduction” runs through Nov. 30 at Inhabit Galerie, 4436 Corrales Road, Corrales. For more information, visit inhabitgalerie.com.

“For Piet’s Sake — Old and New Paintings: Robert Storr”

at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art

SANTA FE — The distinguished art curator and critic Robert Storr, who also paints, said in a 2021 Artnet interview, “I think taste is essentially a conservative factor in art.” And to his credit, Storr championed a lot of art that donors and board members found “distasteful” during his tenure as the senior curator of painting and sculpture at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, a position he held for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, perennially arguing for a distinction between art that looks good, according to established tastes, and art that’s important.

But being willing to exhibit art that one does not personally like, while admirable, is not the same thing as fearlessly interrogating and deconstructing the received ideologies that inform what one does or does not like. Storr’s own tastes remains fundamentally genteel and Eurocentric, which is to say, conservative. His conservatism may not always be apparent in his writings, or in his curation, but it comes through in his art.

“For Piet’s Sake — Old and New Paintings: Robert Storr” at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art presents a selection of Storr’s small paintings from the 1970s and ’80s alongside paintings and prints from the past five years. Although Storr vacillates between painterly and geometric styles of abstraction, one unifying throughline is that it always looks labored and dull. He habitually overmixes his colors, creating beige and putty borefests that make the subdued palettes of Giorgio Morandi look practically prismatic.

The exhibition’s title, a cheeky reference to Piet Mondrian, underscores his conservatism. Why, in 2025, does Storr still worship at the altar of an artist who turned the hot, syncopated rhythms of Black American jazz into boxy, diagrammatic compositions? Storr’s Mondrian knock-offs are even boxier and more diagrammatic than the originals. Painted over a century later, these pointless permutations of lines and squares are as insensate as the shapes on an IQ test.

There’s a perfectionist streak in Storr’s work, too, which I think he’s embarrassed by and tries to hide, usually with paint drips. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with paint drips when they’re an authentic part of an artist’s process. For geometric painters with a relatively loose style — people like Stanley Whitney and Mary Heilmann — drips come with the territory. In Pat Stier’s “Waterfall” paintings, drips are sublime. But for a tightly controlled painter who agonizes over every edge and outline, as Storr does, the two or three drips he sometimes adds to his compositions look phony, as if he’s a robot trying to pass the Turing test and using drips to feign humanity.

For a man who persists in believing that modernism is an unfinished project, I have to say, he’s done a pretty good job in his own work of depleting it of all meaning. Storr is an uncommonly gifted intellectual with an encyclopedic knowledge of Western art, and he certainly knows how to make things that “look like” paintings, but they lack vitality and contain few, if any, new ideas.

“For Piet’s Sake – Old and New Paintings: Robert Storr” runs through Jan. 31, 2026, at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 435 South Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. For more information, visit zanebennettgallery.com.

“Fritz Scholder: Diversity of Brilliance”

at LewAllen Galleries

SANTA FE — “Diversity of Brilliance” sounds more like the title of an educators’ conference than a show of 7-foot-tall demon paintings. But Fritz Scholder drags us to hell and back in these grand, mythic works, which he made in the 1980s and ’90s. I had never seen them in person before, and they were eye-opening. A separate room of smaller paintings and prints gives a broad overview of the artist’s oeuvre, beginning with a 1971 print from Scholder’s controversial “Indian” series and continuing through his pleasant but forgettable flower paintings from the early 2000s.

The “Indian” series, which he began in 1967, launched Scholder’s career and came to dominate all subsequent interpretations of his art, much to his chagrin. In that series, Scholder leveraged the tools of caricature from German expressionists like George Grosz and Otto Dix to create portraits of Indigenous figures as grotesque monsters and alcoholics, which some critics hailed for breaking with romanticized cliches of the past and others lamented for perpetuating damaging stereotypes. The split reception was similar to that engendered by Kara Walker’s work in the 1990s, which used antebellum-era caricatures of Black people subversively, but which some of her fellow Black artists, including Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell, found revolting. Scholder’s case was complicated by the fact that he never claimed Indigeneity. Although one-quarter Luiseño, Scholder grew up with no connection to his Indigenous heritage and later said, “I was mislabeled an Indian artist.” In 1980, he vowed to never paint Native people again. He would eventually break that vow, but for much of the 1980s and ’90s, he turned his attention to European and Egyptian mythology, producing some of the finest, but least appreciated, art of his career.

The LewAllen exhibition features four larger-than-life paintings of Lilith, who, according to Mesopotamian and Jewish folklore, was Adam’s first wife. When she refused to submit to her husband, she was turned into a demoness and was replaced with Eve, making her an archetype of proto-feminist rebellion. In “Lilith #1” (1992) and “Lilith #3” (1993), Scholder gives the subject a flapper-era bob cut, strong shoulders and an elegant weapon — a cane. I can imagine her entertaining cabaret patrons in a smoke-filled room, then whacking them with that cane when they get out of line. In “Lilith #20” (1993), she sprouts bat wings and wears a live snake for a belt. In addition to his Liliths, Scholder paints a spooky shaman, a red-gloved woman with a skull for a head, an immolated martyr with glowing red eyes and, in “Hell” (1996), the Devil himself. “I’ve always been fascinated with the bizarre and the occult,” he told a Smithsonian interviewer in 1995. The dominant colors here are purple, red and black, with accents of reptilian green. This is Scholder in his “villain era,” fully embracing his bad-boy image, blasting hard rock music in his studio and painting a pantheon of self-assured misfits, martyrs and monsters.

Stylistically, Scholder fuses the biomorphic distortions of Francis Bacon with the mythic themes, monumental scale and gestural freedom of Julian Schnabel, an artist 14 years his junior. Scholder was effectively a neoexpressionist avant le lettre, who by all rights should have been exhibited alongside Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, and seen as their artistic forebear. In the late 1960s and ’70s, when cool conceptualism dominated the art world, Scholder was already heralding a return to psychologically driven figuration. But because he was pigeonholed as an “Indian artist,” his work was marginalized and excluded from the larger art historical discourse. Even proponents of the earlier work had trouble wrapping their heads around his new, phantasmagoric direction.

Enough time has passed now that we can see Scholder’s art from the 1980s and ’90s with fresh eyes. Neoexpressionism itself fell out of favor in the late ’90s and early 2000s, then returned again with a difference, with many BIPOC artists and artists from the Global South in recent decades adapting its vocabulary for their own uses. Although Scholder remains a complex and controversial figure, there’s no denying that his aesthetic vision was ahead of its time.

“Fritz Scholder: Diversity of Brilliance” runs through Nov. 22 at LewAllen Galleries, 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. For more information, visit lewallengalleries.com.

In Review roundup