Pivot Art + Culture has some of the greatest art in Seattle today. It also has some of the worst. The boondoggliest. I don’t know how else to put this. Pivot‘s dramatic exhibition of 22 works, The Figure in Process: de Kooning to Kapoor, 1955–2015, is weird.
This is the point in the review when I’m supposed to use an adjective that imparts a value judgment indicating whether I’m telling you to go to the show. Let’s do this. The Figure in Process is very good and very bad. Two thumbs up and two thumbs down. Myself, I wouldn’t miss that.
You’ll notice immediately. The largest of several supersize works is the painting that eats up most of the longest wall in the simple rectangular room of the gallery. It’s 26 feet long and 11 feet high. The German artist who made it in 2014–2015, Jonas Burgert, intended it as a cautionary panorama of postapocalypse, a wasted world with echoes of German death camps. But he created a sea of schlock instead…
