In the past, Brodell has made watercolors of hybrid animals in barren environments. Here, she adroitly uses gouache to tell a personal story that, like her odd creatures, unifies two unlikely elements. Her drawings are by turns comic and poignant in their naked evocation of a child’s fantasies.
“The Handsomest Ken Ever!’’ puts her in a toy sports car as a white-suited Ken doll, stiff and endearing. In “He-Man and St. Michael Find They Have a Lot in Common,’’ the saint and the doll, both clad in chest plates and boots, genially put their arms around each other.
“A Picnic With Audrey Hepburn’’ is the gravitational center of the show. In it, the slender young actress sits on a blanket with her back toward us and all the masculine self-portraits. It’s a picture of mythic femininity, here elusive. “The Handsome & the Holy’’ is a charming, playful, and nuanced consideration of gender, longing, and the conflict a girl feels when she dreams of being a man.
Puzzling prints
Usually, printmaker Yizhak Elyashiv shows abstracted maps and landscapes, often made to document the results of a gesture, such as tossing grains over printing plates. In his new show at Gallery NAGA, he goes in a dramatic and unfortunately mysterious new direction.
Elyashiv copied 15th-century German artist Martin Schongauer’s engraving “The Foolish Virgin’’ as a woodcut. He offers two prints here, one in burned linseed oil, the other in oil and ink, each evoking a woman and her lamp. In the second print, the artist cuts out the woman’s hair and moves it to her chin, like a beard.
I’m not sure what he’s getting at with that maneuver; indeed, given his previous work, it’s hard to grasp the conceptual underpinnings of this pair of prints. In a sense, it’s another exploration of gesture, this time with Elyashiv charting Schongauer’s.
