Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

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The mud monster is real, is painting, boogeyman of the artworld, hiding on everyone's mind - it is the imago haunting art. "Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house." Von Wulffen is drawing in the mud our repressed object. The diamond of painting remains in the rough. The best painters today, Euler, Eisenman, Churchman, von Wulffen, are cartoonists are heart. They are not in service to the church of painting. It's means to draw the world. In our mud of mirage. Painting is a stupid ghost to be haunted by, facet diamonds of. 

See too: Nicole Eisenman at Astrup Fearnley Museet, All Amelie von Wulffen

Berta Fischer at Barbara Weiss

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Stuf. Crushed and molded into gangbangs. Not even necessarily organized or compositionalized, more just amassed. The "errancy" here would be against manners of taste, more an orgy, an excess. Stuf itself accrues a byproduct: a quality we could attempt to separate the difference from surplus and glut; exuberance and waste.

Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery, Valerie Keane at High Art

Friederike Feldmann at Barbara Weiss

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It would be so nice if we could just have some drawing without requisite need of deploying it like a big factory of gesture, magnified swatches of what had been human. The just plain ol' drawing has everything already. This is the fault of the world. We need more drawing.

Mai-Thu Perret at Barbara Weiss

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At what point is it an "archaeology of modernism" "about its vanished, unredeemed visions" and at what point is it recasting its forms in more precious materials, as designer souvenirs of that history? Kobro is deeply underrepresented, sure. I've got t-shirts for sale:

Monika Baer at Barbara Weiss

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Baer playing her own game of painting, our fun is figuring out the rules. There are many ways to play painting acceptably - we, like canvas, can support both Merlin Carpenter or Caravaggio - ideologies that Baer seems to enjoy abutting in flat statements for all static they can generate. Mixed modes that present a sort of meta play of figuring out which boardgame entered. These churn Ryman's milk to cream: the monochrome nullification of the "picture" displaces content to the edges, surface, and hardware which are little comedy acts: "a moment of resistance that appears absurd in its utter ineffectiveness."These are bit more buttery than Ryman, a sensuous to the topography which refuses to totally negate the "picture" with color, comedy. Pleasures are denied and reinstated, the picture plane is mocked with cartoonified sweat but open to atmosphere, the viewer is asked to look in only to be pressed out by a little turd. I'm not sure how you win.

John Miller at Barbara Weiss

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There's Yves Klein blue and John Miller brown, a color so untranscendent as to castrate any pretense of art's higher plane, reminding us of our earthly rope tethering bowels to earth. Log cabins, monk's robes, organic packaging, all reminding us of the earth, the shit that fertilizes us. Miller blockades, belittles, our azure sky fantasy with the lesser order, everything we would prefer to forget immortalized over what had been our vacations, from drudgery.


John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

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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.

Geta Brătescu at Barbara Weiss

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The Romanian Zobernig-before-Zobernig milking and misremembering modernist genres for a discrepant experience of the thing against its meaning that many of today's young interesting artists enjoy, a slowly distending/displacement of its artistic signs protracting artistic identity. Nauman's continual media swapping only served to hone and underscore the themes across and despite its diversity, whereas today it services youth to deny the eventual meaning/understanding implicit in art. See the drawing above and cross-check it with its genre cafe drawing with which it fits but doesn't add up against the breadth of Brătescu's almost methodological formal move making against identifiable parameters in which it can't help but feel ironic, detached, somehow knowing.


see too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Ayse Erkmen at Barbara Weiss

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Erkmen's long varied career now recently threaded with these singular colored objects. There's something psychotic about this compulsive individuating, a violence even, declaring objects whole and distinct in screaming color, severed from the normal mundane order of objects with blankness and masked, objects which reveal nothing about themselves but their difference, manically irrepressible back into the norms of social behavior like little clowns at your ankles, and a video's too-closeness undermining its beauty by holding your face to it so you can't look away.

“1989” at Barbara Weiss

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An inherent desire for stories is what builds the archetypes, synechdocal phrasing of complexity, and like 2008’s May ‘68 revival, we convert time into events and dates into myth, and “1989” becomes shorthand for badges of merit, symbolic bling worn as wreaths around necks, being “there” in 1989, when “the wall” fell, and any representation made then  is a representation of that time if even symptomatically.
The press release asks all manner of great questions, and never whether the art that it ostensibly promotes can answer them.

See too : Group Show at Centre Pompidou Metz