Klara Lidén at Galerie Neu

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Ways to look like like abstraction. Ways to look like minimalism. Ways to look like the good ol' days. refresh the old frames with a patina of the moment. Abstraction distressed like denim. Why do we need to the forms to resemble old forms? This is nostalgia, slightly smelly.

BANK Status Quo Galerie Neu, Berlin

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BANK is CAWD's father. There's no secret around this, and no need for patricide. BANK was there in the primordial reptile brain of CAWD's stewing formation. BANK's Fax-Bak white hot brilliance. The Press Release as decree - and the returns on that decree. Speaking back to the decree. The way Will Smith deterritorialized comedy. This is not filling out a comment card at The Museum of Modern Art, but actually finding a place to speak. Wedging open a space for return.

"Well the whole inside/outside thing is kind of theatrical," suggests John Russell, "I thought we were kind of hypocrites in a way, which is a pretty interesting position - or an unavoidable one. The 'critique' was kind of fun. And we did sort of dislike quite a lot of people."

Josephine Pryde at Galerie Neu

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Genre being the capsule that allows immediate swallowing: "They're about touch." What Isabelle Graw called "straightforwardly thematic." And so we understand them like a trojan horse, internalize with ease. Ostensibly later spring forths the latent soldiers, medicine. But it might be the gulping was the trick. Getting you to immediately get them. The cuteness of gerbils, the joke of consumption.

John Knight at Galerie Neu at The Intermission

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John Knight I would refer to it as a form of discursive specificity, but certainly not the situational model of site specificity that has been proposed by Miwon Kwon and others that tend to legitimate a generation of nineties fashion production, the likes of Pardo, etc., which are essentially designer knick-knacks disguised as “installation art.”

Isabelle Graw So in what way is the way you legitimize your practice through a site different from that type of practice you just criticized, like Pardo’s?

JK Because I don’t think my project is constructed for or received in the same way. It’s not reified under the conditions of the already fixated institutional frame like those projects are. I try not to reproduce the actual model of production that I’m attempting to interrogate, as I think others do with impunity.

Benjamin Buchloh You were the first artist that I’ve known who for many, many years, without even understanding what you meant at the time, said that all artistic decisions are design decisions. Your interest in design as a language, as one language among many systems within an ideological apparatus, has become very clear by now. Your understanding of design history and of design traditions in their transformation from the 1920s to the 1950s is a very integral part of that. Why would you then not welcome an artist like Pardo who supposedly does exactly that in the most programmatic way? He’s the guy who brought this out to the foreground and made a megaproject out of it.

JK Well, I welcome the illustration of the problem I think it represents, but don’t cuddle up to projects so politically bankrupted. It is exactly the black hole of consumption that it wants to be and questions precisely nothing.

IG His work is not about posing or causing problems.

JK There are no problems, but I would take this back to the Bauhaus, and the inherent problems in designing for a better world, which carries itself over to Cranbrook and spreads about the globe as it enters into the marketplace, vis-à-vis Design for Better Living, Design Research, Design Within Reach, and of course, the granddaddy of them all, IKEA. Product design, interior design, and installation design are all deeply implicated in capitalist ideology. It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony.

Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

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Images a total malleability, and we revel in its mud. No longer Euler's symbolist nesting dolls, now paintings more like a mirage, shifting muck of material images, and so uncertain about whether that shark officially looks like a cock or if that's just you. Innuendo as resistance to stable images, a sort of conceptual abstraction for your walls. The latent phallus, that we see in every painting.


See too: Jana Euler at dépendance,  Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Jana Euler at Bonner Kunstverein

Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu

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during a time [1956 – 2004] of ostensible post-war optimism over scientific and economic explosion of the time, the space race, increasing ease of travel, the plane windows we were all finally travelling on instead seeing vast de Chiricoian wasteland, blatantly lonely. A world able to see itself for the first time from the eyes of god and yet Morris' paintings read it as abandoned, moon-like. The virtual plane of technological invention becomes synonymous with the pictorial plane of creative invention. That surrealist expanse that stood in for theaters in their skulls. Painting in that Matrix-like virtual plane - inventing what-you-wish - and yet a vast emptiness, like humanity's inability to imagine anything worth painting. It's pretty bold to say, "I have been given planes, spacecraft, worldly travel, and out my window I see only desolation, maybe some earth converted to farmland." "we are checked by the surface." a sort of comedic reversal, the virtual plane given immediately to its immanent form, paint crust, dust.


Read too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

Jill Mulleady at Galerie Neu

René Magritte, Le galet, 1948; Evelyne Axell L'égocentrique 2 1968"; Theo Wenner, Miley Cyrus Rolling Stone Cover, 2013; Jill Mulleady, The Discovery, 2018

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Things burble up, ghosts drift like flotsam up through the flow of images, us all treading water not wanting to drown in this subconsciousness the PR threatens. Drowning in soup haunted, like a purgatory. Paintings become disfigured, gargoyles misremembered, 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.

“The Vitalist Economy of Painting” at Galerie Neu

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The painting we all think needs some championing, some explaining. The pr retracts the title's seeming promotion of vitalism. In fact rightly says “The problem with vitalistic scenarios is their total failure to take the influence of external social and economic factors into account." and "proves to be mere wishful thinking, albeit a form of wishful thinking that is hugely appealing." Yet we get this, the artists in this exhibition don't so much do vitalism so much as do the usual "subvert them, retract them, or carry them to absurd lengths".  The attached booklet too reading more like a J Peterman catalog of art-patter copy to get you to buy than providing any further insight, blurbs about your a painting with an accredited art historian. Maybe the coming book has more. A sort of buy my book and this art too type of exhibition. Did any of these painters need critical help? Why do we treat painting with kid's gloves, art historians so kind to painting? Couldn't these paintings take a bit more cutting? Their market success on abusing vitalist premise that we hide under a security blanked called criticality, that there may be no real subversions, retraction, or absurdification only a gesture at it.


Click: “Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks

Birgit Megerle at Galerie Neu

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"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

Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu

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The beautification of conceptual art, by assigning it more visceral roles it had once, in theory, rejected, is a hypostatization of conceptual art's poetic function. i.e.: Conceptual Art was always maximally poetic, failing to deliver the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the glass of language to expose perfume of its confusion, irreductive - and glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of the gloss. This is the sinister pulsing quality of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu

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People hate Fontaine. It's easy to see why, and a particularly searing example writ by Chris Wiley for Frieze (and which contains the line, "I also consider the mealy-mouthed, jargon-besotted forms of this political position’s promulgation – utilized by the editors of Tiqqun, Fontaine and others – an impediment to reasoned debates surrounding political change, as well as a crime against language"- a single sentence in an unending screed against the work) is the front and first review of one of Fontaine's gallery's press packet on the artists.  Its use as introduction is exemplar of the artist's grandstanding the impotent and hollow feeling of political ineffectuality as big shiny horrors, the work performing double negation of art/politics that other Ready-made-artist Reena Spaulings was at the same time performing with equally thick hams skated on conceptual packages, but whereas Spaulings inflated the low quality hamminess of its art Fontaine used language of the mignon sort to describe its cleverness in being sable to derive new formulations of evacuation and ineffectuality that pretty much every artist had up unto that point been, thinking they were smarter.


See too: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Sturtevant at Air de Paris, Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu

Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus

(Galerie Neu, Portikus)

Photoshop makes surrealism quaint, Magritte's entire practice premised on its most basic tools, transpose, cut, drag and drop; and today phone apps like magic mirrors to show you elderly, replace your face with your dog, barf rainbows at will in a world that is totally virtual.The image today is understood as a total malleability. Euler's images free themselves of the physical setting - the last vestige of the pre-virtual surrealist - floating free in hyperlink space in which images are links, expanding out ready outpour their content in a deluge to anyone ready to open them.


see too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Jutta Koether at Bortolami

Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

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There are emotional stakes. Sluggish works burdened by difficult existence, the 1000 years of an Imperial Cathedral bears the same weight as a Cheeseburger, all strewn the same next to a deflating globe. Construction, for Pernice, is made like a complaint, the decisions feel heavy and won. Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects had trouble getting erect, the depressive often does, but at this new gallery gets it up with a troubled aloofness: stacking premises the possibility for it but it doesn't feel like real monumentality but faking it for the onlookers, stacking like the pained smile as response.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects,  Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu

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Again a blast from the 2000s past, the ever posturing Fontaine today looking winded, having lost of their fighting spirit, instead merely combating the weight of the world with global travel's candy, and presenting an exhibition exchanging their pre-packaged imposter anarchics and poseur declaratives for an ennui, a gentle boredom, looking out of planes and recursive self-questions, nostalgic for a time when this was still fun, or critically acceptable. The melancholia of the palinode is having watched someone look at themselves in a mirror and possibly self-reflect in their vampirism, a good vampire never does.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu



It would be unfair to bring up Portlandia’s mocking “Put a bird on it” since the spectacle here envelopes a real space, with real birds, not merely a clever documentation winking a la Gambaroff’s cats. The real trick was inviting others to take part in the party shining through the romanticism of it all with the black light of cynicism, Liden’s subtle mockery of public-housing insistence, and Pernice’s can’t-be-bothered urban blight objects, casting the whole thing as a dystopian present which, like the invasive tropical-green parrots of Brussels whose color is dissonant to their blight, the urban apocalypse is at least beautiful.