Barkley L. Hendricks’s paintings shine with a kind of affect that one is inclined to call “beautiful.” And, indeed, they are. Yet they are loaded with something too tense, too bristling with heat to fit neatly into such a definition: something else is here, too.
While the premise is to explore Hendricks’s connection to the Frick’s collection, the effect of the museum’s survey is to change the way we view those same paintings.
Hendricks’s calculatedly cool, compositionally and chromatically bold, and fiercely character-driven visions from the 1960s–80s make this the Frick’s most daring contemporary art intervention to date, and its most effective.