“Now I’m completely bowled over. Greer Lankton has got to be a genius…these are her dolls at her best... One scene is a birthday party for a ninety year old woman of culture and taste. I can’t describe anything that is going on in this scenario because I could actually write a complete novel about the party and the party people…. What a celebration! Hallelujah!!! — Cookie Mueller
“Greer Lankton’s dolls are entire biographies on legs, whole movies, three-dimensional Alice Neels. And they’re all self-projections, all of her contradictory impulses--abjection and eminence, dissipation and what comes after, gender fixed or fluid--examined lovingly and pitilessly. She could locate variously aged and battered versions of herself on the street, in a movie, at a party, alone on a park bench--with her eye she could see herself from outer space, sub speciae aeternitatis. And her taste and her skills were impeccably suited to her unique medium. Why did we have to lose her?”
— Lucy Sante
“I found my first encounters with Greer Lankton’s grotesque dolls shocking. My cohort of 80’s artists challenged authorship and valued detachment and did not warm to raw displays of intimacy (and god forbid craft) that were the core of Greer’s prescient, messy battle with beauty and pain. Current culture is hungry for exactly what Greer’s art serves up - the exploration of gender, imperfection, self-expression and authenticity.” — Laurie Simmons
“Lankton’s creatures live in a psychic interline where genitals and gender identity are scrambled in the play of appearances, and reveal an exacerbated, possibly mutilated sexuality as the trigger of personality. Like Theodora Skiptare’s housewife automata that vomit and menstruate, Lankton’s ambisexual dolls wear faces of crumbling self-assurance, or even moronic friendliness and self-contentment, while breathing pain in and out through their pores." — Gary Indiana, Art in America, 1984
“Of course, to say that a doll by Greer Lankton is “just a doll” is absurd. Lankton’s dolls are like no other dolls, and no Lankton doll is like any of her dolls. For that matter many Lankton dolls weren’t even like themselves from one moment to the next. Lankton constantly reworked them ‘changing their gender, identities, sizes and clothes.’ But some…change by being photographed from different angles, using different lighting and backgrounds. Simple as the photographs are, they manage to bring the dolls to life, give them a story.” —Douglas Crimp
“She has become, to this young community what Rimbaud must have been to Paris in the 1920's. She has been compared to Hans Bellmar and to Frida Kahlo, for both have created highly self referential imagery affected heavily by events which have changed the course of their lives.” — Dean Savard, co-founder of Civilian Warfare
“Lankton assures us that memories of childhood are simply sugarcoated nightmares.” — Timothy Cohrs, East Village Eye 1984
"Beautifully sewn, with extravagant clothes, make-up and hairstyles, they were at once glamorous and grotesque and exuded intense, Expressionistic personalities that reminded some observers of Egon Schiele. They presaged many of the concerns of '90s art, including the emphasis on the body, sexuality, fashion and, in their resemblance to puppets, performance." — Roberta Smith, New York Times:
-
For any PR inquiries, please contact Max Battle
