New trend: forgetful surrealism

(Jeanette Mundt above)

New trend: forgetful surrealism, a sort of traumatized historical painting. Bleeding through. Your memory of painting clouded, convoluted themes. Less the vitamixed collage of say Juliano-Villani and more like Picabia with a head injury, amnesia allows the soap opera to continue again, repeat its plots in new ways. 

Artists include: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt

"almost like the history ... bruising into paintings. How images transact through time...  Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, [historical] hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine."

"Painting is its ghost - not so much has cultural baggage as is cultural baggage. A history [these] paintings stir reflections on its surface. And you see something in it."

"... using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us."

See too: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt

Birgit Megerle at Emanuel Layr

(link)

Banality in the soft technicolor of handtowels. Or looking more like the hand-coloring of black and white photographs. Adding rose to the cheeks of children, ceruleans to the skies. The PR would chide you for not liking dogs, that populist obedient critter which, like sunsets, seem to be beyond reproach in culture. "like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche." But above take these forms and squeeze cotton candy out from it, spank the sunset for its bruise.


See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley, Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, “J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

Birgit Megerle at Galerie Neu

(link)

"Claire Bretécher’s smokey eyes or a precisely applied black eyeliner are forms that have become a consolidated look that can be put on like a shield. Slider turtles, whose shells are designed according to their habitat, renew their carapaces regularly, though undoubtedly not at a particulary rapid pace. Presumably, painting the make-up shields also takes a long enough time to move slowly enough through the different forms of feminisms that have developed since the 1970s, and at the same time align one’s own image in and with the mirror of the other figures. Birgit Megerle’s portraits would thus confront the pressure imposed on us by some ideas and ideals of beauty with a form of artificiality and masquerade that serves both as strategy and information."

Comparing the mutating patterns of turtle's phantasmagoric plastron to the shifting tides of women's facial adornment is alluring, if wonderfully specific, aligning of cosmetics as carapace, the movement of hard form patterns with a liquid and glacial place, rocks behave like fluids over geologic time and all that. Which has something to do with Megerle's own puttying of her hard edge source material the PRs over several exhibitions having been mentioned as importantly missing, the brushing out the inflated curls and rounding of eyebrow's high angled peaks, replacing their ostentation with a hematoma of makeup. The exchange is unsettling, Megerle's despecifiying of images, removing from them their character, their selfhood, depersonalized, like the most unnerving villain you could face would be the shifting fluid of an inkblot, a blurry monster.

See too: Birgit Megerle at Kunsthaus Glarus

Birgit Megerle at Kunsthaus Glarus

(link)

Banality in painting makes tense a medium we think of as so inherently singular. Placing its original object in the neither-nor world of common. These are like staring at milk, an object of effort to make so plain, pasteurized, from a fount so specific and pink. Even the more particular subjects achieve some iridescent vague. Paintings you could find anywhere but fit nowhere, Megerle is diligent in boiling the paintings to something congealed, gelatinous, soft-firm, melting. Living with one of these would be like hiring someone to mock your individuality everyday.