Brick Ladies of NYC at Ad Hoc Gallery

Last week I was privileged enough to be invited to the "V.I.P." opening of the "Brick Ladies of NYC" show at Ad Hoc Gallery in Williamsburg. The show features legendary graffiti artist Lady Pink and verging on legendary street artist Aiko, formerly of the artist collective Faile. The show is a conversation between the two artists. Lady Pink's graffiti style paintings on canvas are hung on the left hand side of the gallery and Aiko's paintings, prints and a vitrine of jewelry and the bunny toy she recently designed for Kid Robot, on the right. Joining the two is the back wall of the gallery which is a collaborative work between the two artists. The wall is dominated by different shades of pink which, on first look, seem to be simply nebulous rose clouds. Upon closer inspection figures painted by pink and stenciled by Aiko reveal themselves in the blobs. Both artists deal with the female figure. A friend joked that if "the artists were straight men you would be mad." Lady Pink's paintings show women, often made up of bricks and forming the city, and the brick women depicted in the the canvasses become the walls Lady Pink paints. Aiko's women recall classic pin-up girls with butterflies and bunnies playfully stenciled, painted and screen printed in strategic locations. As such, her work questions the ways women become commodities in a marketplace, promoting and selling with their suggestive sexuality. The cross gallery dialogue is also carried out between the two artists' styles. Lady Pink's paintings are slick, the paint heavy, glossy and vibrantly colored, and it is easy to imagine her earlier work adorning city walls and subway cars, though it is just as easily adapted to the canvas. Aiko's work is frantically (but carefully) layered, prints and stencils carefully placed, paint drips exuberantly controlled. You can imagine the pieces being wheat pasted on a conspicuous doorway near you. Ad Hoc owner Andrew Michael Ford, an exuberant supporter of Lady Pink and Aiko's work, calls this work the "new contemporary" and I certainly hope that we see more work as dedicated and strikingly executed (and fun!) as this. The show is up until April 20th.