"The best new painting in New York right now is Sam McKinniss's Black Angus at Night, 2025, a dramatically spotlit portrait of a cow standing in a field against a pitch-black sky. On view in his solo show "Law and Order" at Jeffrey Deitch, it has the air of an accusation, suggesting a bovine criminal caught in the act. The exhibition's twenty works depict popular emblems of delinquency and authority, collectively taking up the reciprocal relationship between disciplinary regimes and media representation."
"Inevitably, McKinniss's renderings of famous faces tend to receive the most attention, but animals are his real strength. Black Angus at Night is deceptively easy on the eyes, its opulent realism belying a thornier internal dissonance: Here he crosses the seemingly incongruous languages of the pastoral and the penal, the absurdity of the scene heightened by the grandiosity of its presentation."
Sam McKinniss's Black Angus at Night (2025) is a spotlit portrait of a cow in a field under a pitch-black sky that reads as an accusation. His Jeffrey Deitch solo, Law and Order, presents twenty works that portray emblems of delinquency and authority, mixing celebrities, animals, and cultural icons. McKinniss favors animals, using opulent realism to create dissonance between pastoral imagery and penal themes. The cow-under-arrest sight gag gives way to ethical unease, signaling the arbitrary brutality of carceral systems. Nearby, Roman Ondak's work revisits experiences of state socialism, reflecting on shifting codes of permissibility and social control.
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