Past: Tobias Kaspar

"None of this is lost on Kaspar who has been gliding between fashion-as-art and just-plain-art, just-plain-art mirrored in the silvered rise of other painters reflective own, fashions which for the moment the flash can be frozen"
Past: Tobias Kaspar at Silberkuppe

Sophie Thun at Sophie Tappeiner

(link)

Forensic or creepy photo lab guy, you implicated in eyes looking back, our hands all over these eyes distinctly not from page 7 of the Victoria's secret catalog but something far more fragile, wounded or capable of. Not really much of the erotics of Paul Sepuya's, more like that Sky Ferreira album art that made people so uncomfortable. Uncertain, our relation. That Anne Collier structural cleverness that everyone seems to love.  Like Roni Horn's You are the Weather, the ever slight variations in a human face are alone more than enough for an artwork, face's ability to crumple, wither, and smooth itself in expression. Hand manipulate them to be so.

Past: Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

"Berger's exhibitions look like group shows, filled to the brim with objects inconsistent. If outward appearance needs consistency to "make sense," if fashion is meant as an expression of its subject, the wearer, we could draw a line from Berger's fashion discourses earlier to now: a breakdown in objects ability to communicate its subject, artist or wearer...."


read full: Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

Nikolas Gambaroff at Schiefe Zähne

(link)

As far as drab shows, this one designates the criteria, midcareer artist shooting himself in the foot to prove the town he's still capable of blood, thought. You have to be righteously in awe. Unsure whether to be happy with the lack of convertibles and toupees or designate this as artistic such.


See too: Nikolas Gambaroff at The Kitchen, Nickolas Gambaroff at Galerie Meyer Kainer

Gillian Carnegie at dépendance

(link)

A sort of carving Euan Euglow by way of Vilhelm Hammershøi, an Arrangement in Grey and Black the number one thing is the references we could pile upon these. Peppered with Sphinxes whose riddle must be answered, painting. And us all tossing darts at meaning. Carnegie's slow career to worlds with no light, almost shadowless worlds reticent, seen in distant silver. All those butts and suns previous and no one makes a Bataille joke. Two reviews from the time instead horrifically conclude with allusions to the artist being "in the mood," the other having "the arrogance of a girl; one who knows how to get you off, when to put out and when not." No wonder Carnegie went indoors, away from the light's "ignoble shaft" "the indecency of the solar ray." Instead something mercurial, resistant to hands, and thus why all the writing on Carnegie is pretty much awful, this. Simon Thompson's letter at least refuses to attempt manhandling the situation, with and not at. If what Mayweather did was easy, all boxers would do it. Withdraw as a form of iconoclasm, luminous in rejection. How annoying to wither, die, under the mockery of a cat's impassion.


See too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz, Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

Frank Stella at Marianne Boesky

(link)

People love to invoke Walter Robinson's quote: "I admire Stella because he is making the ugliest art it is possible to make today.” Which, maddeningly cannot find the original source for this quote since the padding around it seems to matter. Because admittedly, the staggering asininity is their joy. They are like a clown exploding diagrammatically, intestines like silly string. The clown dies. But Stella's are essays in permanence. Matthew Strauss grammed all the various bird shit/piss on these that they will weather, because there isn't anything you could smear on these to make them better or worse, like a clown. And also like a clown, if a tumor is unchecked growth of a body, Stella's seem the unchecked growth of "creativity." Moles everyone has an opinion on whether we need them checked out. Which pretty sure is like a clown. Which pretty sure is a metaphor the these, some type of unchecked growth, clowning. These belong in the banks lobbies you see them in, absurdifying the notion of taste, of unchecked growth, all the clowns they let past security.

The lumpy, crusty, has become an almost exhausting form. The play dough, the bulbous form which embodies a sort of embryonic potential of "creative act," and vessels for. The lumpy is an excess which proves the artist, showcases their hand. Replacing the drip as the new expressive. Things droop, we bloat. We got the -itis, some form of imflammitory disease. Pimply like we're pubescent, cute, like at any day the potential of our maturity, almost uncanny.