New trend: forgetful surrealism

(Jeanette Mundt above)

New trend: forgetful surrealism, a sort of traumatized historical painting. Bleeding through. Your memory of painting clouded, convoluted themes. Less the vitamixed collage of say Juliano-Villani and more like Picabia with a head injury, amnesia allows the soap opera to continue again, repeat its plots in new ways. 

Artists include: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt

"almost like the history ... bruising into paintings. How images transact through time...  Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, [historical] hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine."

"Painting is its ghost - not so much has cultural baggage as is cultural baggage. A history [these] paintings stir reflections on its surface. And you see something in it."

"... using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us."

See too: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt

Amelie von Wulffen at KW

(link)

Ghosts in our garbage, [x] in our things. Nightmares in the waste repressed, under the rugs, stuffed into hills, called landfills. Our history. It accumulates. In corners, on paintings. The mud of culture. The brown of painting's history hides a lot; we'd prefer not to remember.

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

(link)

"She utilizes the brown hued bluntness of the German palette – a favorite of 18th century genre painters through to Anselm Kiefer – as if it were a genre all its own."

That's pretty good. And one would wish for a listing of von Wulffen's does with color and painting that feel so egregiously like painting trauma, its history of abuses, like that bic pen blue that smears out of the clouds, the eruptions of full ROYGBIV rainbows of colors unnecessary. Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house.

Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings

(link)

It's almost like the history of painting is a trauma that comes bruising into von Wulfenn's paintings. How images transact through time, in notional reassemblages, incorrect.  Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, like your head full of hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine.



See too: Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

(link)

One of the few painters not caught up in their own stylistic bog, instead with ease shift between means that never feel coerced by their author. It will be fun to one day see von Wulffen's retrospective because there will be surprises and not strategies.

Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

(link)

Working from comic books and Veggie Tales, von Wulfen's reactionary content not in the figurative - which has always survived as still merely a question of how to hang paint - but narrative painting. Taking care that we actually care what the cherubic nubbins like mangled erasers might be looking at, some lascivious and reactionary content. The work's out-of-dateness used as its cool, espousing traditionalist values.


Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick , Sanya Kantaraovksy at Marc Foxx