Seth Price at Friedrich Petzel

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Has Price gone "painting"? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels everyone was only speaking of conceptually despite Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. Because Painting we believe is interminable, mysterious, whereas the vacuum-form is a product and thus taken as limited, understandable. Painting instead is held at a permanent distance of an oracle. Products we believe are empty. And Price with all his Rorschach tricks (ultra-HD videoing of Squid chromatophores as an almost explicit version of the both the inky comic character and psych test) attempting cultural products as the same enigma.
Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic. It will produces something alien, mysterious. Halter is right to bring up Gulliver's Travels in relation to Price, the book intended as a spoof of travelogue's desire for exoticism that also came at time when access to scientific technology like microscopes had become common, travel and tech magic depleted into something for parody. We'd been keen to be left with a joke, but when this tech eventually obsolesces into banality, we should prepare for simply being left with abstractions, hands clutching inkblots.


See too: Seth Price at 356 Mission, Seth Price at Stedelijk Museum, Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst

Cosima von Bonin at Friedrich Petzel

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"Von Bonin's post-'90s work anticipates the professional artist's return as full-time manager of her own brand-image.  [...]  Graw describes von Bonin's shift from ephemeral and intensely collaborative projects to the kind of object production befitting an international art star both as a decided "capitulation" to market forces and, paradoxically, as a devious "outperforming" of the market's demands. [...]  In any case, von Bonin's use of style as a means of elaborating games between subjects and objects, between the artist and her works, is as controlling as it is evasive. It is where the contemporary subject loses its distance from the commodity, but it is also the place where distances can be reappropriated and made strange again. " -JKelsey

"Her art is soft and sociable but dangerous underneath" - JFarago

"Von Bonin is no handmaiden to either the marketplace or academia. Somehow she slips betwixt and between these two extremes of our current art-world narrative, indeed creating her own, alternative 'plot.'" -F Hirsch

This seems to be the place where writers stop. Having attempted and failed to peel the stubborn adhesive from the surface they claim, "ah look how stuck together they are!" And admittedly von Bonin's adherence to the commodity - despite every critical attempt to remove it from - is sticky stuff, and eventually one wonders if there is a layer at all, or merely a patch drawn to appear such. And the whole critical art world grouped around attempting to pick quarters painted on the palatial shopping mall floors while above their bent necks the objects transact. The critical establishment hallucinate quarters because they are needed to eat. They stand around in the shape of an old president.

"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway." "What is it? In fact it is objects." -Broodthaers.

See too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

Keith Edmier at Friedrich Petzel

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Traditionally sensitivity isn’t emblazoned in high production's hard materials. Sensitivity is softness, not the fine detail of edges, resins, supermodels. The supermodel is, generally, not a thing of sensitivity, but violent eruption for complicated affinities, like Edimer's own relationship to precious romanticism, exemplified in Hainley's pop quiz from hell "20 Questions on Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett" leaves a sweating testee over multiple-choice: objects not complicit with categorical determination but manifold intakes:

"2. The best adjective to describe the overall effect of Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000, is:

a)Romantic
b)Ironic
c)Kitsch
d)Erotic
e)Sincere
f)Vexed"

See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner, Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Joyce Pensato at Friedrich Petzel

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 I mean a painting really needn't have that many drips. Pensato appears not so much flinging paint as some existential outpouring but against the dictum that one shouldn't fling it at all. [Even the most expressive of the expressionists was tempered by some masculinist higher order of capital P painting.] The outlandish resistant to the decorum expected of certain, uh, populations. Making them feminist, a big goofy face at your expectations of civility, protest.

"It’s the result of the schizo positioning of painting today, in which everyone wants a subjectivity expressed but no one wants human expression. The hysteric is the ability for the human to appear through the grate of order; social, relational, capital, or artistic."



See too: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire, Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

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Guyton began as the perfect Warholian*: a slacker drawing Xs, and killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction, the production proved it and this alongside the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine and pulled from. Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities potentializing dreams as any other. And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people, the newspaper printed was in fact the eruptions of all those subconscious desire's added up, a real freaky thing indeed.

* even perhaps moreso that the direct illusions by the race rioting Walker, Kelly

Furthermore: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium 

"Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them."

Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel

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Like injection molded dolls to the grinder, like PVC fetishists inside too-hot cars, like your makeup running from tears or acid rain, disfigured, de-gloving Barbie's arms, Homer's shotgun bursting his wife's face in makeup gore: Tyson's melting figurines. The violence done by painters. The destruction of the features by wayward strokes. A little loose green to cleave the face. Tyson's world is injected molded and dripping. Now crushing women under press. These the smushed faces of clownish, grievous, plastic hurt.


See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Kaoru Arima at Misako Rosen

Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel

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Seurat's subjects were lost to method where the calculative replaced care, an artifact of style that Eggerer transmutes into a violence, draining the person from people under his aerial high-view out over his subjects. What makes Eggerer an even icier painter than the morbid bloodletting of photo-influenced Germans is Eggerer's return to moments before photography's explicit rigamortis, when then those were still dying.


See too: Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art

Dana Schutz at Friedrich Petzel

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Everyone has these like huge opinions on Schutz. Which drives everyone else to stake larger opinions for themselves. Which causes even further polemics, ballooning so far as to remove any air for little thoughts.

I enjoy Alice Neel for all the moments gone awry in a face. Upon an upper lip you will find hanging a bouquet of exotic birds, a moment of painting brilliance. Martin Creed's portraits channel these "oopsies" moment all over the canvas by painting blindfolded. Schutz actually attempts forcing it, to comprise a painting as a series of series of "painting events" in clean cubo-futurism. Sometimes it works.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Keith Edmier at Friedrich Petzel

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Edmier's towering sentimentality of subject, amplified by its conceptual gesturing (a lone print pulled, orchid's homage, studio ruin's chapel, a press release exhaustingly expounding its cyclical references) makes for a grandmotherly saccharine sweetness, astringent, artwork overipe, propped just prior its rolling over rotting and etching our teeth in caustic overbearingness, the art equivalent to an overbearing mother, sentimentality tortured to its sado-masochistic extreme, its breaking point, its pathos.

And so see too: On Kawara at Guggenheim , Paul Thek at Mai 36

Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel



Landers’ aborted-before-conceived humor is continually resuscitated by the artist’s writings - here etched in the paintings themselves at the bottom of the ocean - imbuing a pathos into the not quite fully gestated juvenalia, asking to be excused for mistakes made in teenage exuberance of dealing with art in the eternal sense, becoming all so stupid and pathetic as to become endearing, like all John Candy’s exasperatingly aloof characters who in the film/gallery's third act find him asking directly and pathetically for forgiveness to found-families for the idotic-yet-winning obliviousness, as a whale wearing flannel about to go down, here an Uncle Buck kept on life-support to achieve immortality as a joke.

Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp & MUDAM

(Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM)
Zobernig the mascot of contemporary art. Daily's MTV host for the cyclical pop-charts of Naumanian genres, here represented in 21st century ennui. Art’s inbred self skepticism, so inherent it's academic at this point. Zobernig isn’t so much skeptical of himself, but returning skepticism to everyone so willing to have to and to hold, all this work. It’s defeatist and excellence.