Weekend Update

February 5, 2003

by Walter Robinson

It’s pinups, too — of a sort — at Cohen Leslie and Brown on 10th Avenue in Chelsea, where the engaging 30-something Cologne artist Kati Barath has installed her first New York solo, paintings of Brobdingnagian nursery giants, huggable black bunnies, masked men and hairy Yetis. She draws her childish figures with extruded plastic which she then colors. They stand arms akimbo, staring out at the viewer with the straight-on intensity that Hugh Hefner made famous. There’s a particularly impertinent nude red-head ….