Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

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Ostoya takes images of historical, political, personal significance and runs them through the office paper-shredder, into abstraction. The overlay of "art" atop the images, both absorbing and destroying the initial significance, a conceptual gesture, making its futurist and Sheeleresque overlay a quasi-destructive act that reviews of Ostoya's paintings spend most space ignoring to tell you about the images buried because its usually easier to elucidate history than art, at root an act-as-question of what reason if any aesthetic overlay performs in creating significance or just aesthetify them, which in the ex's title reference to the New Objectivity who had no issue in caricaturing the object, this old objectivity still given to enjoy birthing a grotesque.

Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe

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Eichwald's ability to make true atrociousness platable, fecal umbers into gastro-figuratives of the stomach churning they induce. Their recuperation of contradictory elements. Not reducible to series of gestures, not looking effortless while still holding onto their improbable coolness, a defining feature against the contemporary sea of gentle abstraction, rendered figuration and Krebberian Spinoff of everyone positioning their paintings look as though off the cuff delivered as god's conceptual ornaments; Eichwald's higherpowers far more immanent, even personal, pained efforts that even if postured still posturing a decidedly uncool thing to affect the trope of painters struggle in 2016. Making pretty paintings in no way tasteful.

See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St

Laura Lamiel at Silberkuppe

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Transition between stages and monochromes is not totally rare. Zobernig studied theater-design before art indistinguishable from props for it. Prina's packed themselves into their own pink stage and Violette. Parrino after he got off the stage. Mosset's showroom which are kind of like a stage. and Lamiel, against such brutishness, a reversed trajectory to stages of lonely avant-garde emptiness. Both the stage and of monochromes laying the spotlight on the only people who can make sense of its void staring back with one big question, the actor encountering the stage manager. Like those empty scenes in the post-apocalypse where people wander through vacant worlds wondering just what to do.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Tobias Kaspar at Silberkuppe

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The trend for newfound ultra-reflective fabrics - in which trendsetting punk bands were even using its image for logos - was at least in some way attributable to the meme-like spread of how cool it looked to take photos of your friends in, ghostly clothing disembodied in empty blackness if you remember, collapsing its marketing vehicle into the very fabric of its product, a feature people would want to disseminate outperforming the logo it made primitive. None of this is lost on Kaspar who has been gliding between fashion-as-art and just-plain-art, just-plain-art mirrored in the silvered rise of other painters reflective own, fashions which for the moment the flash can be frozen look great.

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Shahryar Nashat at Silberkuppe

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In the glut consumed of CA images Daily the immediacy of a work to affect, or stylize "meaning" while withholding it, of which Mona Lisa's smiles is the dead pig beaten titular example of, a gesture of something that like code affects a totemic omen, an endless connotation of meaning, and in this exhibition everything awaits you with bated breath, however deciphering a meaning is a red haired lure, the question is why we feel affected to decipher anything at all, of which Nashat has long been decidedly brilliant at, is of supreme importance.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72 , Group Show at Salle Principale

Margaret Harrison at Silberkuppe



The justifiable reaction to Ken Johnson’s review of Michelle Grabner currently lighting up social networks is an interesting contrast to Margaret Harrison’s didactic outrage on paper over actual glaring societal problems. The Johnson fiasco unfolds in real-time, a parody of New York male critic explaining a woman’s as fit only for parody, as if to prove transgressive the assertion of the domestic, giving talking points to the pundits sprung into the web of interaction; whereas the already-explained nature of Harrison’s texts beget little interest, at least on my feeds, both pointing to the glaring rift that feminism has for a while now been seeking to fill.

The less overt drawings are the more interesting in their subtle freudian fingering of advertorial tropes, of women pinned up to lemons, or in sandwiches portrayed as literal meat, mere garnish to tasty consumption.