Courtesy Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum

Madelon Vriesendorp, "Après l'Amour" (1975). Watercolor and gouache on canvas, 23 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.

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In Madelon Vriesendorp’s Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty is liberated from her harbor post and strides across an ice-encrusted skyline while the Empire State and Chrysler buildings get it on in an uptown penthouse — right before the Rockefeller Center walks in and the world falls apart. It is a world apart — one where Lady Liberty gets existential and the Chrysler Building gives fellatio — and yet, so right. The Dutch-born, London-based artist’s small watercolors from the ’70s display the architectonic eroticism, ribald wit, and open embrace of the high (modernism, Surrealism, Freud) and low (dime-store romance) that define her untraditional oeuvre, featured here in her recent retrospective. The Wunderkammer-ish show was also a repository of her trove of hand-tinted postcards, thrift-store paintings, and thousands of figurines. Although there was much to enjoy in examining the international kitsch, it was Vriesendorp’s paintings that imparted the most pleasure. The earliest was made in the early ’70s, when she and husband Rem Koolhaas arrived in New York and founded OMA; later in the decade, the works were famously featured in Koolhaas’s 1978 manifesto Delirious New York and turned into a brilliant animated film, Flagrant Délit, the same year. And while her paintings that leave New York are also beguiling, with their bare-breasted women in surrealist environs (chased by dragons, fondled by centaurs, a Grecian column here, a concrete factory there), it is Manhattan that is Vriesendorp’s true muse. The repeated motif of the Statue of Liberty roving the city reads as a funny foil to VALIE EXPORT’s serious ’70s-era photos of women draping themselves over Cold War architecture. But the cake goes to the cerulean ardor of Arrival of the Pool (1974) — the poster for the 1978 OMA Guggenheim exhibition — which features New York Harbor crossed by a lap pool, itself studded by a grid of swimmers like some minimalist Esther Williams fantasia, each reaching toward the mirage of Lower Manhattan. This world — where a harbor holds a pool that holds a city’s citizens elegantly racing against the clock — is both fantastic and, since this is Vriesendorp’s brilliantly breakneck vision, fantastically right.

"Madelon Vriesendorp" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.