Julia Haller at Meyer Kainer

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The elusive hunt for more gestures, more brushes, textures, styles. Hijacking the doodles, graffiti, adolescent scratchpads, the painter explores. Different brushes signal something different. This tautology is not nearly a problem. They start to scratch at what we crave: not looking like art. Because art is mannered, stillborn, cliche. Looking like something else would require a thought, and not an interminable hall of mirrors.

Ulrike Müller at Meyer Kainer

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I like when shapes have a gender. When they are “becoming.” Abstraction congealing a being. When they move toward codifying identity, which are icons. When Shapes like embryos. Placental.

Also, what a press release.


see too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

“Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer

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Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production.



See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,

Florian Pumhösl at Meyer Kainer

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Pumhosl always basing his objects on something, assigning a raison d'être, a reason for them to live on gallery walls based: an "engagement with a vocabulary of form from different historical articulations.." [😐] An assumed criticality, i.e. content, the rivers here, differentiating them from the more militant minimalists of history, their objects dumb on floors. This makes Pumhosl's conceptual, a framework which is then treated to a Kubrickian austerity, totemized as the monoliths, allowing the surrounding emptiness of space to lend all the pressure that the gallery symbolically can.


see too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium

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

Anita Leisz at Meyer Kainer

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Maintain the body Minimalism aborted. Minimalism wanted objects birthed without human seed, an alien, a specific object rejecting relations to cultural representation threatening to despecify its particularity.  Leisz's soften that specificity, becoming generic enough to connote and blur with the human made by hand. 

Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer

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The PR, in one paragraph, describes well how the things function; Kelm's practice has narrowed slightly here, removing its expansive and dissonant genres eluding easy art-practice circumscription, the landscapes and genres etc.; this exhibition honed to icons, which are sharp, what would be called "striking" images of the advertorial, direct, but when they fail to deliver anything on that promise of a striking image, fail to reveal anything at all, what the PR calls "demonstratively unspectacular productions" feels not only dissonant, but depressing, like you're complicit in something you never meant to be. This is what makes them equate with commodities.


see too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

“The Unknown Masterpiece” at Meyer Kainer

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The unknown masterpiece it's true, one of these paintings probably is a masterpiece, we just don't know which one yet as these powerful painters stand await at the white gates of history to learn their draw in it.

Nikolas Gambaroff - Galerie Meyer Kainer



In 2010, Gambaroff - just prior to his explosion as cool-art-darling - was making mugs printed with, what would become, his signature slack non-signature, the no-assed squiggle of someone who just can’t be made to care about whatever his authorship might connote, making mugs printed with this, and using these souvenir mugs as literal building-blocks. But the symbolism was oppressive, and Gambaroff, in a moment of what must have been white-hot ecstatic brilliance, stripped the metaphorical baggage and, compressing with coal-into-diamond tightness, conjured pictorially perfect gems, selling as fast as god’s chariots would allow, running into each new exhibition with the all permutations of his painting emissions, and swapping in with each installation gimmickry to keep it looking slightly fresh, as if to prove the immaculate concepts of his on-an-on-ism, a little pro-bono work to help the real coins get passed from behind the installation-as-commodity-camouflage, and evolving with the slow pace of modernist painter getting ready for what to do with his seminal vestiges next, and continued this way ‘till now, here again in front of your face again, 4 years later for the 7th or 8th time.

Currently instead of newspapers and advertorials we have comic book pages, the famous ones from Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow, reduced to sticky ruination wallpaper; and a new variant on the Oulipo-poetry-press-release hiding that even if there were something to say, it would have been the same non-thing for tenth time now, eye-rollingly, whatever; and then the addition of some game-boards to talk about instead, something about social relations, eye-rollingly, a metaphor so symbolically ham-fisted that you wish he had just made it really clear and printed them with what they were always made to say inspite of brushy ineptitude, the gameboards: Sorry.