Review: Martin Skauen at Mihai Nicodim Gallery

The drawings of Norwegian artist Martin Skauen at Mihai Nicodim Gallery remind one of the pleasure to be found in a good dose of alarmingly twisted Surrealism. Severed heads, impaled torsos, dead fish, rats, disembodied elephant trunks, pregnant women in precarious situations — you name it, all presented with an air of deadpan gravity that suggests a mythological dimension.

There are five medium-to-large drawings on view, as well as a six-minute video that charts a frenetic path across the surface of another drawing, which is not on view. They’re rendered in a clean, minimally affected style and littered with deliciously perverse little jokes.

In one, “My Masters Plan (The Guard),” a mostly nude man kneels on the ground with a shield, impaled through the throat by a rod whose tip lifts the helmet from his head, as if doffing it for a king. In another, “White Oak,” a shaman-like figure whose eyes are closed holds a severed head whose eyes are open and alert.

In my favorite, “White Tail Deer,” an old woman with a beguiling smirk presents the severed head of a deer on a platter. Look closer, however, and you see that she too has been decapitated, her head suspended an inch above her neck by the antlers of the deer, which plug like the ends of a stethoscope into her ears.

Curiously, what resonates in the end is not the gore but the poetry of the images. Like fairy tales, they illuminate the darker reaches of the human imagination so as to weaken the hold, ultimately, of demons who lurk there.

-- Holly Myers

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, 944 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 621-2786, through April 11. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

Photo: Martin Skauen's "Hatching Season" (2008), pencil on paper. Credit: Mihai Nicodim Gallery