Marcia Kure’s sophomore show at Susan Inglett Gallery continues her careful work, using watercolor, acrylic, pencil and elegant collage to reinvent the self as a singular body of overlapping origins. Whether drawn, painted, or cut and pasted, the body Ms. Kure sees is a cross between an icon and a scientific specimen: centered on white paper, widely matted and framed in black, it is lifted out of any ordinary context in a bid to clarify what defines it. The collages, made with faces and body parts cut out of fashion magazines, set up a tension between the legible fragments of specific figures and the more loosely figurative overall shape. The Mask Series V: Mona Lisa sets a portrait-sized woman’s head with wavy brown hair and a sinuous lacuna sliced out of the middle atop a smaller body. The shape reads as an early Renaissance portrait, with the model’s face and hair standing in for a matron’s hood, while the lacuna gently denatures the face’s original function. It’s large enough to blank out the model’s expression, but it leaves enough of her face intact—two eyebrows, one eye and cheekbone, the whole forehead—to preserve her individuality. The Renate Series: Ménage à trois is drawn with pencil, watercolor, gold and—following an Igbo artistic tradition from eastern Nigeria, where Ms. Kure studied—kola-nut pigment. A polychromatic fetus or newt with a bulbous head and entangled, snakelike fingers, it has crossed, overlapping pigeon toes that create a keyhole-shaped orifice between them. And The Mask and Saint Series I: (The Finger), drawn with acrylic ink, kola-nut pigment, silver ink, pencil and snow, is a narrow conch shell or a tall, blackish blossom—but the specificity of these anatomical allusions is only in the overtones. For the most part, Ms. Kure is slowly working from the outside in. (Through June 15, 2013)
