Michael Tarbi

Self-portrait as a Hunting Target, 2006.

Using human skulls and bones can easily come off as heavy-handed or melodramatic. Likewise, using human anatomy can come off as overly diagrammatic. Michael Tarbi uses the human body in all those ways, and is able to come up with works that escape these traps.

What one first notices is Tarbi’s exceptional drafting skills employed in a variety of media: pencil, paint and even ballpoint on paint. Tarbi studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, the nation’s oldest art school, where staunch realist Thomas Eakins taught. This rigorous background shows through in the careful execution of each piece in the show, whether a small drawing or the large-scale Transfiguration, which revives the David Salle “drawing with paint” style of the 1980s. Tarbi notes that the school is divided into two camps: the academics and the conceptualists.

Within the vast reaches of art today, though, Tarbi could still be considered somewhat of a traditionalist.

The show’s best piece, interestingly, strays from the predominant theme of human anatomy. Self-portrait as a Hunting Target presents us with a stately ram on a sumptuous gray field, its fleece rendered in such a thick way that the curls become a low relief. What completes it is how the figure breaks down: The torso ends before it reaches the edge of the canvas, and the feet are almost comically rendered with a touch as crude and gestural as the wool is carefully sculpted.—Erik Wenzel