Contributed by Mary Jones / The old joke begins, “A horse walked into a bar…” That could be one of the titles of the 15 new ceramic pieces in Noa Ironic’s lively show, “The Good Chyna,” now up at bitter.nyc. Ironic’s horse, however, would be high on ecstasy. Fantasy and desire abound as she negotiates identity, social anxiety, memory, and a little poker. “I like oversharing,” she says. Ironic’s work explores gender, and particularly masculinity, and in “The Good Chyna” she proves a prescient and empathetic observer. Roiling within her imaginative narratives are power, control, competition, and curiosity. Card games enact both chance and cheating, a Shabbat is celebrated, relationships are tested.
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Ceramics was a completely new medium for Ironic until the summer of 2024. Lonely as a RISD graduate painting student stuck in Providence without her classmates, her native Israel at war, Ironic accepted an invitation to work at Mudworks, a ceramic studio nearby. It was an immediate fit, both sanctuary and adventure. She responded viscerally to the primal feeling of a ball of clay held in her hand, and the small scale provided intimacy and freedom that also informed the large oil paintings she was working on. Drawing had always been fundamental to Ironic’s work and incising into the wet clay “felt like uncovering a memory made tangible.” She welcomed the surprise of the process – the unpredictable colors and textures of ceramic glazes – and the challenge that, unlike with oil painting, revisions are impossible.
Horses hold a special place in the work. Ironic sees the horse as “a tool for humanity,” ancient as cave paintings and bred for every possible human purpose. According to American Indologist Wendy Doniger, “You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when. ”Naturally, there are lots of phallic references, as in the single, large oil painting in the show, Uptopeeia, where two women are peeing copiously, their genitals wittily hidden, as curious horses eye them. Often the women have visible penises, as in Pissing in Cubist Nightmare. Of her gender blending Ironic says, “that’s just penis envy at the end of the day. Although I’m happy in my own body, I’m often jealous of men.”
In Peeing on Ecstasy, Ironic is the horse, supporting her lover through a much needed pee while high on the drug. The setting is a nightclub bathroom, with other club goers peering over the stall. Horses often have human feet in Ironic’s work, as this one does, and a pedicure to boot. The watercolors of Otto Dix, one of Ironic’s many influences, come to mind. Like Dix, she creates characters navigating social circumstances with delicate line and an unfettered hand that keeps pace with her active imagination. The details are captivating and nothing is arbitrary. A quick individuation animates all eight characters. The peeing man’s chest hair, tattoos, and muscles are expeditiously delineated, as are the brows and watching eyes of the onlookers. The color is complementary and expressionistic, a flurry of hot red against aquatic greens.
Usually, Ironic works with the clay as soon as it’s flattened from the press. For the newest pieces, however, she scalloped and trimmed the clay slab. In Watching TV, the shape contributes to the pleasant harmony of the scene: a woman watches a man while the man watches the TV, his lips at her breast. A black cat is snug and asleep with the pair. Green light from the screen washes over them. The man is embellished, or perhaps blemished, with red and black splatters, the woman’s thigh bears scribbled, shorthand tattoos. The lovers lie in a bed of patterns, their intimacy a tentative, Klimt-like luxury.
The title “The Good Chyna” incorporates Ironic’s misspelling or typo (no one really remembers) of the word “china.” In keeping with her improvisational sensibility, she decided to retain it, fancying the phonetics as a dig at Trump’s strange pronunciation of the word. There’s plenty of angst in the work, as well as social critique, but Ironic mediates it all with dark humor and an appetite for pleasure. As she says about Expresso Martini, where a big, naked, muscular man offers his lover a jewel-like martini, “It doesn’t take much to make us happy and yet we’re all so miserable.”
“Noa Ironic: The Good Chyna,” bitter.nyc, 45 Division Street, Second Floor, New York, NY. Through November 22, 2025.
About the author: Mary Jones is an NYC-based artist, a senior critic at RISD, and an instructor at SVA.
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