From butterflies to crayons, the unlikely lineup of fighters continues. Next up, flowers! There are a few floral paintings in the show, including a dreamy piece by Jenna Ransom who combines the imaginative yet exacting linearity of Hilma af Klint with the washed-out ethereal romanticism of Ross Bleckner. Meanwhile, in Sally Jerome’s Hothead (2024), a hardy, almost extraterrestrial-looking plant snakes up and over a razorwire-topped brick wall as if making a prison break. Its yellow floral head is a cluster of what looks like angry brass instrument tubing and cartoon ears, but beneath all the Seussian zaniness, the plant is a rugged survivor, not to be messed with. I would choose this fighter.

Although the show’s title references the familiar imperative given in many fighting games for players to select an avatar from a range of available bodies, no digital, interactive, or video game art is included in the show. Some works do reference games, such as Michael Gac Levin’s New Peace paintings, in which Super Mario-style trees and kawaii lemons slide their way through lo-fi graveyards. Stephanie Temma Hier’s Couldn’t Have Hurt Me More with Dynamite (2023) features a handcrafted stoneware chessboard with rooks, kings, and pawns that project out from the wall. These phallic forms enframe an equally suggestive oil painting of a popping Champagne cork, which, combined with the title, may imply toxic masculinity or simply the painful, Kafkaesque denouement of a once-exciting relationship. Hier’s two players have the same number of chess pieces and neither has a very good position, prefiguring a long, drawn-out endgame that’s sure to bore everyone—the perfect metaphor for anything dull and loveless.

The delightfully doodly and droopy stoneware works by Anaïs Isabel De Los Santos are the only freestanding sculptures in the show, and her badass animal-bicycle amalgamation, Bike Girl 3 (2024), with its blue plaid glazing and kickstands that look like ninja lanternsharks, is a knockout. If the art did come to life and start brawling, Bike Girl 3 would do some serious damage. A solid choice for a fighter.

The winged woman in Amy Tidwell’s painting A Spot of Luck (Divine Justice) (2024) is a latter-day descendant of the harpies of Ancient Greece—a good pedigree for a fighter. But Tidwell’s harpy, with her soft-focus Lisa Yuskavage-esque body and awkward, rubbery legs, is about as far a cry from those mighty “hounds of Zeus” as today's dachshunds and pugs are from their ancestors, the wolves. Fortunately, the artist has kept intact one of the harpy’s best offensive weapons—her massive guano bombs, which the poet Virgil once called “abominable.” Tidwell has built up the harpy poop as a three-dimensional element, nearly an inch thick, using many layers of oil paint along with a transparent, oil-based gel medium. She said it took her several months and a lot of trial and error to achieve the perfect luster and texture. Far from abominable, it’s as radiant and glorious as a geode—but just as deadly, I suspect, if one dropped on your head.

Choose Your Fighter! II is not just about the choices artists make but also the ones we make as critics, curators, and collectors when we choose which artists to endorse or defend. When reviewing a group show, for instance, I have to pick the works that stand out to me, and many good artists are inevitably left out. Ellon Gibbs and Zoe Argires are great colorists, and I look forward to seeing more of their work, but their relatively understated paintings got overshadowed in this particular grouping, as did works by several other artists.

But if we were all suddenly teleported back to the art world of the 1940s, where artists and critics got into barfights at the Cedar Tavern, the one artist from this show I would readily defend with both my words and my fists would be Andrea Emmerich. She is a true original. Like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Emmerich uses instantly recognizable yet polysemic symbols, which she layers into fun visual puzzles. Her oddball approach to color palette and materiality is rooted in an offbeat conceptualism—think Rachel Harrison or Ashley Bickerton—which she has developed into a language all her own.

In her sculptural painting GO (2024), Emmerich tells us, in big Mel Bochner bubble letters, to go. But what does that mean? “Go” contains contradictory meanings. Start the game, or scram? The letters are striped red, gold, and green on a field of black glitter, and below them, she has painted a naturalistic underwater scene. The piece is bookended by 3-D Corinthian columns made of clay and foam, and the underwater scene sits “on top” of these sculpted elements like a top layer in Photoshop—a tricky illusion to pull off, and she does it. While the tropical fish and Rasta colors make me think of Jamaica, the kitschy faux-classical columns give “New Jersey diner.” So, is the underwater scene an aquarium? A TV screen? Emmerich is playing with contrasts—nature versus simulation, escape versus containment—but always obliquely. Her work is irreducible to any statement, message, or fortune-cookie one-liner. It challenges, puzzles, and provokes, as the best art should. She has two good drawings in the show, as well—a stack of leopard-print pancakes with cartoon whiskers and eyes, and a mermaid gummy bear sportscar. While I doubt her anthropomorphic pancakes could hold their own in a literal street fight, Andrea Emmerich is a formidable contender in the battle royale of contemporary art.

So, go! See the show! Choose your fighters, and fight for your favorites. Of all the 2024 summer group shows in New York, this is certainly one of the most lively and intriguing. And if you don’t agree with my picks? Fight me!

The exhibition runs through August 18th.