"It just dawned on me that it would be a terrific subject,” says Red Grooms, discussing his latest

“The Unicorn Strikes Back,” 2006, oil on canvas, 96" x 96".

work, a sextet of huge paintings based on the legend of the unicorn. Grooms’ fascination with the medieval period was largely precipitated by historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, which contrasts life in Europe in that be-knighted era with modern times. “That got me interested in the 14th century,” he notes, whereupon he came across a book about the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s showcase for medieval art and architecture. That discovery provided him with the narrative for the six 8-by-8-foot paintings, which function both as a playful send-up of art-world iconography and as a legendary tale.

Grooms’ medieval-motif canvases are executed in his quintessential robust, cartoon-like style, replete with bold primary colors and antic figures. Here, instead of the rollicking New York scenarios for which he is world-renowned, Grooms presents a gallimaufry of plumed lords, wimpled ladies and fierce-visaged archers firing their crossbows, along with prancing horses, barking dogs and flotillas of gliding swans. “My work is awfully busy—to a fault,” he concedes. “I try to get the right number of figures without going too far.”

There is a striking auditory as well as visual quality to Grooms’ work. If his New York paintings

“Side Pocket,” 2006, oil on canvas, 56" x 69 7/8".

could be transmogrified into sound, they would be a contrapuntal scherzo of taxi horns, fire sirens, boom-box music and construction-site jackhammers. His Pop-Art spoofs of the cosmopolitan cacophony of New York life make the pulsating city as intimate and lovable as an old friend, albeit one with a few quirks. So, too, with his new unicorn-themed works: The energetic scenes seem to summon forth a clamorous panoply of neighs and brays, blaring hunting horns and thundering hooves, capturing all the idiosyncratic exuberance of medieval life. It isn’t that he’s totally given up on New York, Grooms explains, “It’s just that I’ve been locally influenced for so long.”

In his New York paintings, the city’s emblematic landmarks function essentially as a backdrop for its people, from delicatessen waitresses and street vendors to marathon runners and subway musicians. The personae in these paintings often evoke the raffish guys and dolls of Damon Runyon’s stories. Grooms himself, however, feels a kinship with tabloid photographer Weegee, “a huge hero of mine,” whose roving lens in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s caught streetwise tenement kids and opera-going socialites with equal agility. He also cites contemporary novelist Kevin Baker as “a real ally.” Baker’s historical novels, such as Dreamland and Paradise Alley, hark back to the New York of exploited garment- district workers and manipulative Tammany Hall politicians.