Gotham Dispatch

by Max Henry

Mavericks and Money

A lot can happen in a year's time. Witness, for example, the rise of bad-boy painter Damian Loeb, much envied for his seemingly effortless ascension to art-world superstardom, despite becoming something of a critical punching bag. Hot off the heels of his successful show at Jay Jopling/White Cube in London, Loeb has returned exactly one year later to Mary Boone gallery for his second solo exhibition. Back in 1999, his surrealistic, postmodernist Photo Realist paintings were all pre-sold for $15,000 each. This time around, the five new works have found buyers at a whopping $30,000 a piece.

Loeb's five paintings, all done in 1999 in oil on heavy-weave linen in a seamless, brushstroke-free style, imply a continuous narrative thread involving an imaginary meeting between a young man and a nubile young Asian woman (an ex-girlfriend, perhaps?). In one picture we see the girl in a cheerleading uniform at some track-and-field event. Another work, titled Fish Sticks, shows her naked in a kitchen while our young man -- he looks like a grad student -- stands peering into a refrigerator. Still another shows her in a bright red dress at a roadside motel, leaning on an automobile.

As one might expect in our callow age, she winds up as road-kill in the final work, Stop (Anytime), a victim of god knows what, her fashionably dressed lower body shown on the ground underneath a fence, with her poor dog equally dead on the pavement off the main road. Loeb's not a linear storyteller. Rather, he dangles his modifiers and is cryptically ambiguous.