Greg Breda, Breadth...Width...Depth..., 2019. Acrylic on vellum. Photo by Elon Schoenholz. — Greg Breda, *Breadth...Width...Depth...,* 2019. Acrylic on vellum. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.

Nina Chanel Abney is an artist who, as a teenager trying to make friends at a new high school where she was no longer one of the few Black kids, offered to paint free portraits of African-American pop culture icons for classmates. She's the artist who capped off her MFA thesis with Class of 2007, a painting depicting her white classmates as Black and behind bars, while she was a blond, white pistol-packing guard. The woman is bold, to say the least. And so is Punch, her group show at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles.

Arranged along the four crisp white walls of the cavernous gallery are a wild variety of figurative works united by their energy, iconoclasm, and willingness to unsettle. Most of them are by LA-based artists, including some of the city’s buzziest names, like Lauren Halsey and Henry Taylor, who paints vernacular scenes and portraits of notables with the same reverence. (Punch was preceded by a New York version at Deitch Projects.) Placed together in such abundance, the works electrify the calculated neutrality of the space, and stay with you after you’ve stepped back out into the blinding SoCal sun.

There are many highlights. In a handful of small, neatly composed collages that repurpose images scissored out of porn magazines and art catalogs, the enigmatic Brooklyn-based Narcissister pays tribute to artists like Vanessa Beecroft, Walead Beshty, and Duchamp. In Arcmanoro Niles’ If I Get Too Close Will the Magic Fade (I Got a Taste for Poison), a curaçao-blue portrait of a somber African-American farmer with hot pink hair sits atop a yellow haystack, while just past his knee is a crude but vivid red line drawing depicting cunnilingus.

Interestingly, one of Punch’s few non-figurative works is no less evocative of the human form. Nearly six feet long, Halsey’s Slo But We Sho (Dedicated to the Black-Owned Beauty Supply Association) layers three rows of synthetic hair in red, black, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag, flamboyantly suggesting countless hours of painstaking labor and dreams that refuse to be denied. It’s a knockout.

Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney, was on view from June 29, 2019 to August 17, 2019 at Jeffrey Deitch, 925 N. Orange Dr., Los Angeles.