Jongsuk Yoon at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Eventually the referent points of painting get so soupy and all over that there is achieved an almost transcendental genericness, all that is common in painting, like you have reached bedrock. Without the identification marks of modernist genius, instead an everyone, everypainting, that starts to feel like those big claims to the universal again. 

Katharina Grosse at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Grosse is the most French painter alive. Which is impressive for a German. Deftly avoiding the historical German anxiety* to instead shoot acid rainbows, prep rooms to catch clowns exploding. The French taste for acrid color. Us all happy Bernard Frize hadn't thought of it. The mess was qualified by its scale, which felt like reason. Because it's hard to package both scale and mess. And this was its critical quality, "site specific" and unconsumable as anything but painting, no support for its sale, just paint, everywhere. Painting dirt was probably the crescendo of this. But now an attempt to package the ether, like Yves Klein's sponges, a structure to sop the aerosol, give perfume both air and object, like a misread jewel. 

*Though admittedly Richter too wiped the burden to freedom.

Daniel Knorr at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Specimens of the world, color, art. "...resemble the little pieces of the Berlin Wall often sold as souvenirs." Torn from the it, placed on walls. Vivisecting our still respiring world - slicing it apart to begin the coroner's report. Art as a form of playing doctor, pretend this is real make believe, the fantasy of anything but a big dead beautiful rock.

Jongsuk Yoon at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Turning Frankenthaler into the cotton candy it's become for collectors, what was latent become libidinal. Stirring the surface into a delightfully consumable substance.

Helmut Federle at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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It seems artworld is hard to parody well since most depictions aren't particularly comedic or even apt. (e.g. the opening's tray of grapes that marks the most naive scenes.)  If not just wrong, the worse blunder is attempting a cartoon satire; it's far better to leave the the depiction dry, unchanged, art parodies itself. I mean the artworld actually has a polished cranium that floats around having practically sedimented socializing as a career and sleeps 3 hours a night. We have statements like this: “Federle has destabilized the square, its solid form, and turned it into something that no longer represents authority. His squares are defined by their relationship to the space around them. His compositions are decidedly non-hierarchical.” What's best: I believe it, it's a good description, good art writing, accurate. And it is totally ludicrous. Art is superposition of inanity and grave seriousness. That I like these paintings.