Mark Prent at Mitchell Algus

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Rarely blatant horror, the genre relegated to SFX and haunted basements. Thek's meat, or Bellmer's arrangements, Nauman, McCarthy, even Bosch or all those paintings of saints' martyrdoms, aren't as expressly, grotesquely, violently, there. Texas Chainsaw Massacre frowny face. But artists love violence, what painter hasn't cleaved a face with brushstroke. It's there, implicit in so much art, proving the bloodlust buried. But theatricality is coming back, Max Hooper Schneider or Ajay Kurian, so violence admitted maybe with it too, our hematophagic libidos.



Violence: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Robert Longo at Metro Pictures, Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Sam Durant at Praz-Delavallade & Vedovi, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

Steve Keister at Mitchell Algus

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Packaging, those ubiquitous garbage shells and skeletons lining boxes, deprived of the commodity, is each its own Fecteau sculpture, enigmatic and otherworldly, carved with some idiosyncratic system inferring the subject carving it, the capitalistic pressures governing the commodity or the artist, similar systems. Appreciate packaging. So covering this artifactual content of packaging with Olmec heads is a strange choice, answered by the artist's statement: “the ubiquitous Styrofoam carton inserts which littered the sidewalks of Tribeca contained a kind of relief that echoed the forms which distinguish Pre-Colombian art" which lovely to believe some illuminati like conspiracy of mesoamerican symbologies latently placed into our refuse, and furthered with the observation, "Keister points out the significant influence of pre-Columbian art as a common modernist source, and the earlier" which we'd love to believe.

See too: Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi