Group Show at Nagel Draxler

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This is what 10 years ago looked like.

Lutz Braun at Nagel Draxler

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Irrepressible loveliness of paintings today blooming and bruise color as stains: we can't precisely handle beauty unencumbered, it must self-erupt as painterly stigmata. The material ooze, blood of painting conjured by the neo-occult painter. Braun by no means a great example of the vogue since predating it by a decade, and, on occasion, even applying paint, but look back and see in his history a painting that predicts every painting made today.

See too: Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s, Max Brand at Off Vendome, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Sergej Jensen at dépendance

Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler

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Bijl the euro-weirdo existing on the fringe of artworld purview. Probably in need of a retrospective. Bijl is the missing-link between Broodthaers' display-tact-as-object-creedence-lent and today's culturo-marxist-surrealists. Like, see David Lieske. Sign detached ever-so-slightly from its signified, like wearing a mask of its own face. Tableau in which the performers perform themselves. And question of, "How could I ever possibly be not be myself?"  Is the Scrooge McDuck staring into you still the Scrooge McDuck when he is set into the alternate blank white universe where he acts only as a referent sign to himself, or was he always only a referent to himself. Like, see David Lieske. 

See too: David Lieske at MUMOK, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, 

John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

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The PR would have one believe its difficult apprehending a similarity to these two artists who really both seem to be keepers of the sewer. Miller's are the populist abject to Sittig's paint bile blowouts. Miller's mines the cultural detritus of things we would have sooner forgotten, how awfully the spectacle of game shows has spoiled and molded, Sittig draws out the sewage from the drain of abstraction, and expression gone wrong, both standing in the darkening mire of ugly culture, both about learning to love disgust.


See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St. , Group Show at David Kordansky

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