Maria Lassnig at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

(link)

Everything mutant. Many explained well; Johanna Burton: "an animated approximation of the homunculus replete with all manner of magnifications and obfuscations, ostensible distortions that operate—counterintuitively, perhaps—in the name of not realism per se but perhaps something like a corporeal existentialism." or on Lassig, Paul McCarthy: "Francis Bacon does not know how to paint backgrounds."

So a note on the lighting, which Lassnig's is the cool bleaching of fluorescent "bright white." Tele-visual light. The light of the millennial gallery. Inundated enough by that coldness, the dawning of CAD and the seared product photography of contemporary art, our eyes to acclimate, so we could finally see it. Lassnig painting for years what would finally shine on it. And under the cool colors of "cheery palette of soft pinks, blues and green" there's always something yellow underneath, a lemon squeezed on metal, something pissy. A tendency for picture rot, like urine on the table despite the embalming light for your dissection. Lassnig: "The picture is very yellow, much yellower than in reproductions."


See too: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

(link)

Of the early ellipsoids Buchloch in the beginning told Genzken, “You haven’t even understood Carl Andre yet.”

The concern is laughable today. Kwade with impudent glee buggers Andre, presenting him with a bastard of his old clown materialism, a cartoon of the world bent in plasticity, a clock ticking amplified to hyperbole, material categorically "pure" in more ways than one. To bend with a compulsive confabulation to materials, present a doubling of the world split into seen and understood. That what you see isn’t what you see, what you see is a fun-house, whose objects aren’t specific at all. If minimalism expunged all but its axiomatic constitutes, Kwade’s bowlderization replaces what was lost, a point minimalism never had.

See too : Puddle, Pothole, Portal at Sculpture Center , Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation