Ulla von Brandenburg at Barakat Contemporary

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The vacancy that pervades, it's more understandable when the artist comes from scenography. They're supposed to lack subject. That emptiness you feel, that's art.

There was the briefest micro-genre of "theater art" - Otto-Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, Okiishi, Mauss - for whom art leveraged its ostensible excuse/raison as painting-as-backdrop to make totally gentle paintings. Which went wayside when people just started making paintings again, no excuse needed. But the original "real-fake doors/paintings" may be Heimo Zobernig (also coming out of theater scenography)  - who made a stupider and therefore more menacing version, a truly fake art that by getting mixed into the real stuff presented a pretty scary question, until we decided it didn't matter, the art party needed its backdrop.

See too: "in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage."

Heimo Zobernig at Petzel

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There is no bedrock to terrible things. Imagine something bad, now imagine it a little worse. Make it children. Redder. Make it expressionist. Continue until you have ugliness you cannot commit to paper. There are further depths than this abyssal trench. A drill is required to get deeper technicolor horror. The baseness of Heimo Zobernig's painting. Things you can't explain to father. 

Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz

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"In other words [Zobernig's] extreme banality incites questioning [disinteresting objects must expel interest elsewhere], and exposes its stage to skepticism wrung [institutional critique].
The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from contemporary hats irrupts a manic laughability at the depths of that hat."

The dizzying aspect of its practice is its ability to lack any particularness whatsoever, terrifying blankness as genericness as phantasmagoria, projecting ghosts of modernism on the backs of our brains.

See too: Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig - Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

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This is as close as Zobernig will ever get to tie-dyed, and the distance is important one. Zobernig's approach is far too flat-footed to pace even stoner psychedelia. The colorful fuck-all isn't pleasant to weary red eyes but an irritant meltdown of modern values, gobbling all tabs before freaking out and regurgitating it back out all over the squares. This is a joke about post-war babies running races against their parents values sort.

See too: Than Hussein Clark at Futura, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig - Petzel,  Krupp, MUDAM

Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza

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It's important to note Zobernig's background coming from theater design. Objects which in their replicant mis-rememberance of archetypal painting instead limn its vague caricature, a consensual version, short-circuited to be art that already looks like art. Becoming stand-ins (theater sets) for the contemporary, or its "zombie" version.
In other words their extreme banality incites questioning, and exposes its stage to the skepticism wrought.
The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from contemporary hat irrupts a manic laughability at the depths of that hat.
The jewels in the rough here work because their showcasing of the exhibition around it proved that they were never needed to begin with.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Margaret Lee at Team , Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM , Seven Reeds at Overduin and co. 

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.