Hayzie Rose at Tourne Gallery

Hayzie Rose, Woman in a Box (Nude).

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST October 2, 2024

Hayzie Rose’s art in her show at the Tourne Gallery at 83 Leonard Street includes paintings, sculpture and digital prints. The work is strong, unusually various and also ambitious. No fewer than five pieces  have the word Gravity in the title. I asked why? “It has to do with our place in the universe,” said Rose, a 33 year old New Yorker. “It’s what hold us to the planet, it holds us in orbit. It’s really the starting point of our existence here. I keep coming back to it."

Rose works in both figuration and abstraction, which has become the new normal, and which is usually done smoothly, but Rose makes the formalist conflict her whole point, as with Woman in a Box (nude), a piece she made this year. "I try to make a contrast between geometric shapes and the human form. You will never find a straight line on the human body. But a society is not like that at all. It’s geometric, with rules, regulations and little lines, and having to fit into these boxes."

"So I was really trying to show this organic form… which doesn’t really look like a figure but you can tell that it is. And how it is framed within this perfectly square box. The way I framed it she looks like she’s uncomfortable sitting in this box, it looks like she’s squeezed in. But she doesn’t fit perfectly inside. She’ll never fit perfectly into any shape that isn’t natural. We are unique in our shape, our form.”

Rose’s use of shapes and forms can vary strikingly, sometimes within the same piece. As in the sculpture, Eternal Union, features two elongated figures, each with a single enlarged and knobbly foot. I could almost see Giacometti and Henry Moore fighting it out here, I noted. Rose said I was not the first to make this observation. “But that is not an intentional thing at all,” she added. “I use myself a lot for my figure references. And in terms of my mental state and how I see myself and how I am looking at the time. My idea of myself.”

Rose’s use of texture also varies widely. The four figure piece, Family, for instance, looks broken. Which it was. Rose sculpted the figures out of two layers of differently colored clay in a process which absorbed all the moisture. “So it all cracked” she says. “But before it fell apart I saved it with resin. So it was a happy accident that ended up looking pretty cool”.

Hayze Rose’s use of wordage is another interesting add. The sculpture off a nude, truncated in the Venus de Milo fashion, has the wall text, Never Follow Your Shadow, and two painted portraits have the in your face titles Who Are You Hiding From? and What Are You Covering Up? So Rose would seem one of the least likely of artists to leave her work untitled but in fact there are three Untitleds here. “They are between two phases of meaning,” she said. “I left it to the viewer.”

  So to another striking element in the Leonard Tourne show, which is that Rose has attached eight of her own short poems to the wall alongside her pieces.

One is headlined Steamy Thoughts. It reads:

My reflection is partial

My reflections unclear

If I free myself from the haze

I become a handprint on my own face

Time was when artists and writers occupied the same cultural space. Picasso was close to Guillaume Apollinaire and himself consistently wrote poetry. Philip Guston got cultural sustenance from the novelist, Philip Roth. That time is gone. So Hayzie Rose’s poems? They have a job to do. “When people ask me will you explain this piece of art to me, I write it down it. People can give the art their own meaning, how it affects them,” she said, adding “It’s a way of describing something that’s abstracted. But I’m also giving them a nudge in the direction in which I was going.” WM