Michael Krebber at Morena di Luna

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Oops. An artist doing a little show where no one will really see it quietly attempting to take the cash and bam exposed on CAD like being pantsed, showing like clean white gallery underpants, and these as you can see from the photos are very freshly laundered, like an ad for the cotton that holds them. So of course it's the one with the smooshy brown on it you like the best.

Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern

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Remember when this was fresh? was fun?  Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed.  Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool, and the socially posturing a pen of legitimacy. All very radical then, yes. Then we saw video of cops killing people. It's clever writing trope to then ask if a world where these are still interesting is better or worse.

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

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Krebber seems to be preferring to these days. A brand established rescinding pleasant discussions of the elusive "krebberesque."  In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism. Excitement and Myth has given way to branded production. Having once "suddenly instructed his students never to paint again" now producing paintings at a brisk clip.


see too: Group Show at Greene Naftali

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler

For all Krebber’s hoodwinks, in the grand and continuing view of his practice over decades, the oeuvre looks tame, conservative. Compare a walk through Chelsea today sees violent lashing out in the struggle for visibility. What allowed Krebber to be, here in “youth” 90’s - 00’s, unflappable. Perhaps presence of famous friends. This of course his subversion, the aiming at self’s feet for well placed shots, and a long trail of much loved blood.
But revelatory here the prairie-home innocence of this time periods exhibtionism, less the silly artfair painting jest redoubled today as bad paintings joke sold to collectors, than the nostalgic young Krebber and friends having a time in the country. The famous “digging into the mirror” photo's context reveal much less conceptually prescient images of Krebber for instance with a boot dangling from his ass. Similar to Capa’s filmrolls revealing his famous shot soldier really hadn’t been captured midst ballistic trauma, but rather tripping over his own feet.

Affiliated: Krebber at Daniel Buchloz

Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz



Herr Krebber is a minefield for reviews. Where other artists nimbly or glaringly leave crumbs as symbols for reviewers delightful mouthful, instead here a booby’s trap to bite your tongue, and the smartest, silent, the boob himself. The fallout of a Krebbershow unpredictable, the initial awestrikingly dumb often long-running toward prescient. The whole incest-vampiring of all those bad reviews at GreeneNaftali, before then showing paintings at those writer’s galleries, and voila they’re on the map.
The German Buchloz shows tend more toward reservations than the often more detourned NYC equivalents, a little more stylistically “Krebberesque” and here looks no different. Squiggled and brayered paintings, how nice, look great. A press release that beats all the mysterio PR of the last couple years with a 1 ton weight. We could take it as “Fashionable Nonsense,” but maybe its theme of causal indeterminacy will seem aha fresh in a month. The peddler cries, “In the name of the prophet – figs!!”