Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.


(link)

Not so interesting perhaps from a PierreMenard/Sturtevantian vantage (the whole tongue louse, deterritorial author theft well trod), but maybe as a continuation of Douglas' clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some sloppy "painterly moment." They feel sorta cheap (it would not be the first time the artist has ordered paintings from China) and that seems too, the point, like Smith's lame name, a mere means to fill an exhibition.

In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt—one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work. 
Douglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house—aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets—and photographed the results. She reproduced the images on small canvases using the kind of print-on-demand machines you find at CVS and Walmart, then painted over them again. 
“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of decent-looking stuff made really quickly,” Douglas says now. “I was thinking about how I might be able to get him to think that I was doing something more elaborate than what I really was.” -Taylor Dafoe, artnet