Past: Kerstin Brätsch

"The exhaustive potential of pleasure is further and further documented, enacted continuously. Interface - from CNN's talking heads to Matchmaking apps to bus ads - survive on their fittest evolving further adept stimulation of our primitive emotional wiring. WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. Brätsch's use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies"  - is exhausting..."


Click here Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi
Click here DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery
Click here KAYA at Deborah Schamoni
Click here Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi

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The exhaustive potential of pleasure is further and further documented, enacted continuously. Interface - from CNN's talking heads to Matchmaking apps to bus ads - survive on their fittest evolving further adept stimulation of our primitive emotional wiring. WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. Brätsch's use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies"  - is beautifully exhausting, like our tears forming jewels.


See too: DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

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2009, 7 years ago, 2 years after the founding of DAS INSTITÜT, already, then:

"However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.

“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers..."  -Adam Kleinman TZK

What started as a mock "import/export" business in 2007 became so quickly real, its sham background mattering little in art so long as it looked like it, and the network "featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations" and franchise friendibitions and its hard to deny a room full of so much something.

See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner,  Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

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Genzken the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects; for some time the exhibition had been replacing the singular object exhibited as the base unit of art. And whereas others used this to produce "series," product lines, Genzken extrapolated, used this as a means of acceleration in which speed and production was the communication, attachmenting amassing product and centering production as the point. Genzken's resurgent rush fucking-the-bauhaus predicated interest on their speed. That the production of itself became the product.


see too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner , Ann Craven at Confort Moderne,  Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown



Since the patternal permutations are endless in indifference, little interest found in their production line marbles in interminable variation (though the PR does its job unpacking and assigning new roles to the symbolism.) Brätsch’s work never quite looking as good as their commodity packaging counterparts found on store shelves everywhere but still fine, its more about the curled paper tacked and temporary walls and mystic install.
Of course some collector is going to put them in a frame, but for now they look crappy and disheveled and good. Well it would be enjoyable to get in here in the A.C. and take a break.
But no one is ever going to believe in these surfaces, or get up close and just admire like the nebulousness of it all, man, the same spirituality found in patterned mandala of so many bolts of fabric, again inbetween production lines, like that Henning Bohl show at Casey Kaplan, or the sublime rot of Sigmar Polke. This is Gavin Brown afterall, the gallery who finds interest in the profound gap of meaning and enterprise in art.