Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

(link)

It was hard to argue with the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism. Awkward buildings colors and installations, scribbled pleasures later. Rendered dumb, it didn't speak to anyone, rather happy with, instead, simple existence, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence, like attempting to see a Rothko with a pile weighing heavy in your bowels, the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures lifting spirits instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are.


See too: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin

(Proyectos Monclova, Barbel Graesslin)

Looking at dead things, torn from their living context, trapped under ethyle acetate in the kill jar's sterile light and pinned to walls to make a butterfly collection. A collection we understand culturally to hold meaning for the belief in the docents and researchers behind it. But they mean only what we know about them, and the objects sparkle. Like dead butterflies, Monoliths, and signifiers, blank beautiful entrapments.


See too: Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.,

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

(link)

The eponymous "relief" of the exhibition comes from the work's insipid blankness as "fundamentally soothing to nervous system" - as David Foster Wallace once reasoned his recurrent reading of a particular column of Cosmo magazine - a subscription to the infantilizing soothe of a overloaded system proffered paralysis, a shutdown, the catatonic aphasia of Reality TV, celebrity tabloids, and now paintings, in which the real is replaced with its dummy version, relief from problems by a warm and swollen balloon replacement, the real replaced with a sex with an inflatable on Ambien, fundamentally soothing, just like these painting.