http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/arts/design/cosima-von-bonin-swimming-against-the-tide.html 2016-09-23 00:48:10 ‘Cosima von Bonin,’ Swimming Against the Tide This SculptureCenter show owes as much to “Finding Nemo” as it does to Manet, Whistler and other artists who turned to the sea. === This world, Hamlet tells us, is a sea of troubles; love, every pop star will assure you, is as deep as an ocean. For the versatile, sometimes inscrutable German sculptor Cosima von Bonin, too, the sea is a metaphor for our own lives, and she brings to our dry environment visitors from the deep. Hermit crabs and octopuses flounce on furniture, burdened by all too human anxieties. Clams stare out of their shells, their goggle eyes bearing down on you as if they know your secrets. Ms. von Bonin’s idiosyncratic sculptures and installations, often making use of colorful textiles, have made her a leading German artist, and now, belatedly, she is receiving her first museum show in New York. Ms. von Bonin’s soft sea creatures looks like children’s toys, but their ironic anthropomorphism is very adult: There’s nothing cuddly about them, and many look exhausted by modern — that is, human — life. A drooping shark, made of stuffed beige cotton, sits at an undersized modern desk, fins poised as if it’s typing. The eyes are hastily cut out of checked fabric, and even the teeth are floppy, so that the deskbound shark appears to be singing or screaming. It’s one of several instances in which Ms. von Bonin places soft animals against hard surfaces. A vermilion hermit crab is spread out over an X-shaped table base, its claws and antennas slumping to the floor. Those judgmental scallops are sitting on a wooden swing, like children or showgirls. Octopuses, famously brainy, are a frequent motif of Ms. von Bonin’s, and the stuffed one here is composed of a dozen fabrics, from floral patterns to neon-printed flags acquired in Japan. (You may be reminded of There are also three works with sound, in collaboration with the Humans are especially unknowable, Ms. von Bonin suggests, whereas fish might teach you something if you spent some time with them. The place to do that is the shoreline, and this show also includes sculptures of changing cabins, food trucks and a lifeguard chair, with another hermit crab facing a pair of microphones, as if giving a news conference. The seaside, so important to Manet and others artists of the late 19th century who painted the bourgeoisie at leisure, here becomes a place where aquatic animals can chill out as well. Relaxation and idleness are markers of sophistication in Ms. von Bonin’s book, and if her scallops and octopuses look a little bored at times, that should be seen as a sign of their modernity. “Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?” is the latest bull’s-eye for Ruba Katrib, this institution’s internationally minded young curator, who over the last two years has presented recent exhibitions of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook of Thailand, Erika Verzutti of Brazil and Anthea Hamilton of Britain. (This particular show is curated by Ms. Katrib and Sarah McCrory, director of the festival Glasgow International, where a related show appeared last spring.) It’s also a fitting counterpart to the Museum of Modern Art’s current show of work by At the start of her career, Ms. von Bonin frequently made the social milieu of Cologne into fuel for her art. She turned her New York debut, at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1991, into a group show, inviting the painters Jutta Koether and Martin Kippenberger; the writer Isabelle Graw, who’d recently founded the magazine Ms. von Bonin’s collegiality, and resulting lack of a signature style, has made her somewhat less of a known quantity than others from her Cologne generation. This brilliant show may change that, though it would be a shame if she became known in New York for only dolphins and mollusks. Not since 2007, when the