Through August 12, 2026

Mitsu Okubo likes to offend. By some accounts, his last exhibition here, “97 Drawings” (2021), was so controversial that the gallery was threatened with the loss of its lease. That was during the height of the Me Too movement and shortly after the breaking of the Jeffery Epstein scandal, making it the worst possible time to exhibit crude and creepy drawings harkening back to the Chicago Monster School. Prior to that, Okubo spent years making hyper-pornographic collage works that would make Hans Bellmer blush, always obscuring the thin line between indulging in prurience versus making wicked fun of it. But now times have changed, taking a turn toward the fearful. 

That means that the new watchword is how obsequious and risk-averse (i.e. boring) are many exhibitions. Because we live in perilous times, the call for rebellious art is more urgent than the need to circle the blandly decorative wagons. Okubo’s current body of work lives up to that mandate, reminding us of the old but still relevant adage that art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

The dates of the 17 works on view, all 2021 to 2026 and untitled, indicate that Okubo worked on some or all of them over an extended period of time, revisiting and revising each one again and again. All are executed on flimsy pre-stretched canvas panels with their sides painted black. Many surfaces bespeak of haptic collage activity sealed under thick layers of white gesso, with occasional flashes of tinted color peeking through. Are these underlayers evidence of previous works that have been abandoned and recycled into new ones, or have they been carefully planned? Okubo produces random surface disturbances that destabilize and complicate the picture planes, thus intensifying their instability. It really doesn’t matter much either way, because what we see is plenty unstable, which strikes me as their aesthetic purpose.

These “Milk Feet” paintings are all executed in black acrylic, starting off as swirls of calligraphic oval shapes that are later amended with grotesque pictorial attributes. Just as the white grounds are textured, so too is the black calligraphy, ranging from ink wash to impasto with both matte and glossy attributes. Sometimes, they look like lurid hallucinations derived from clots of recycled motor oil, which is to say they are nasty. But they are at the same time very funny. Each is like a mirror that reflects prurient viewers back upon themselves, mocking the abuse inherent in the vulgar mise-en-scéne.

Three of the images are of full figures, while the rest are little more that claustrophobic faces flanked by palsied fingers and toes, all looking alarmed, embarrassed or frightened. Each figure pulls a scowling, toothsome face as he (it is always a he) anxiously fidgets in his tight confined space, looking as if he were imagined as a collaboration with R. Crumb and Philip Guston. Their glib cartoonishness quickly gives way to something less cute, where violence, desire and spectacle dissolve the last remnant of self-possession in order to establish defiance.

The philosopher of art John Rapko coined the neologism Phobocomedia when answering a question about what to call the merger of the comic and the horrific. Okubo’s paintings are most certainly that, but the ratios of those two ingredients emphasize the latter in sharp contrast to other artists who prefer to highlight the former with a Pollyanna giggle. When thinking back to his previously exhibited works, we might imagine these new paintings as a kind of turning of the tables by objectifying the frozen mania of stunted voyeurs paralyzed by their own castration anxiety. The Freudian view gets to the heart of the matter by reminding us that pornographic fascination is what he would call a reaction formation, that is, a compensatory psychological position that uses objectification to ward off the irrational fear inspired by the thing feared. In Okubo’s paintings, we see just how grotesque those motives can be. And that might be the funniest thing of all.