“In the New York works I’ve done,” the artist Red Grooms has said, “I have tried to make it a kind of portraiture thing where I was really trying to get the texture of what I thought I saw, particularly in the neurosis of the population.” Grooms’s art is as vibrant and electrifying as his subjects. He was born in Nashville in 1937—Charles Rogers Grooms—but changed his name to “Red” because of his flaming red hair. Grooms moved to New York City when he was 20 and has tirelessly chronicled its character ever since. In the 1960s, stints working with the conceptual artists Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg led to his “picto-ramas,” multimedia creations for which he became famous. Now 85, Grooms is still hard at work. This exhibition is centered around a recent painting, Ninth Street Women Meet The Irascibles (2020), created after Grooms read Mary Gabriel’s book Ninth Street Women. Her tales of the cutthroat female artists who stormed the citadel of abstract art reminded Grooms of The Irascibles, 18 artists photographed by Life magazine in 1951. The group banded together to boycott a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, “American Painting Today—1950,” that left them out in favor of more conservative painters. (Among The Irascibles were Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.) Along with the title work, the Marlborough presents 26 paintings by Grooms—portraits of friends who populated his early years in the city. —Elena Clavarino