Lucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst

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Displays and information, the stuff always embedded in other systems - legal grey areas because the signifier is always a bit ...removed. Inhabited. It's all fake. The painting above left is her own copy of the 2005 original. Which is not a forgery, but it is something. Slippery. In the style of. From which era are we looking. Is this mis-en-scene or are we actors? Who's thought bubble is this. 

See too: Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Atelier E.B at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

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How many artists/art projects have started, or started as, a fashion brand? It's almost a genre at this point, the "art" fashion brand. (This one is the slightly more material-historical project of Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie.) Fashion is a perhaps more honest about its object, which is really the brand, the effort to construct the aura that anoints its objects. And honesty about what backs the work allows for a more complete control over the gesamtkunstwerk, the ads, the displays, the showroom itself. The walls don't even need to be white, the production line of aura. 

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel &Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel, Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath.  Images are treachery, sight can betray. A genericising only serves to underscore the point. And that old po-mo question what does it mean for art that seeing reveals so little.


Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

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Different from other representational returns prizing the awkward and cartoon, Mckenzie's representation is surreal in its explicit literalness, a directness that in art is almost vertiginous in our distrust of it. The appealing comfort of the bourgeois home's surface, all surface, the modern question of whether we should believe in the sign or not, the surface or not, like clue boards we're not sure to trust, as the PR states: presenting legal grey areas in culture’s appetite for the genuine.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque