Frances Stark at greengrassi

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Country and date of US coups looming over pop songs from that year. The level of frission between the two varies.* Grand Funk Railroad's 1973 hit is pretty apt: "We're an American band / We're comin' to your town / We'll help you party it down." Others are less on the nose. The discrepancy provides the interpretability, that poetic fissure. The internal disjuncture on a semantic completion, allowing that sort of blank state that you dear viewer get to ink your own adventure into, wall text or otherwise.  This would be a much less interesting if Stark hadn't for a long time now been investing in bedroom posters as self-construction, adolescent in the good sense. The point isn't being political but in construction oneself as political.


see too: John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Shelagh Cluett at greengrassi

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Things modernism might cough up in the night, a visceral utterance, hacked. Sort of becoming-modernism, an abject type. Resembling - as opposed to mimetic or autonomous forms - this in-betweeness - which wasn't so acceptable then, not a pure ideation, but happy with amorphousness. Occasionally resembling Lynda Benglis's objects of around the same time, they seem a caricature of the dominant masculine modes, and too bad Cluett missed the whole unmonumental resurgence. (We weren't really resurging artists in the same way then were we.) But there's something very now about these now, and its too bad that things have to be ordered like that.

Janice Kerbel at greengrassi

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Typographic enunciation. Abstraction that get its content too - legible. All manner of questions in the difference between reading and looking. One is data processing, a systemized manner we have been trained specifically for. That though the "lake" in your head is not mine, we have quasi-equitable terms of exchange. And so you can disappear into a text, be "transported." Looking keeps you here, staring, what you are meant to do with that is up to you.  The difference between a serif or sanserifed "GRAB" is interpretable.  This "Grab" is fancy, that "Grab" is plain. The different garb we dress in. Despite comics' or Wool's long interest in such matters, these are dressed tastefully in tuxedos to match our white walls.

Pae White at greengrassi

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like nature, White's both immaculate and arbitrary, rearrangeable, customizable for your space. It has no turf but program that is expandable to fit your needs, almost printable. White could make 400 of these of every size, and they would all be equally beautiful, lovely. This puts her in line with most painting made in the last 20(?) years, modes that already contain their expression and are run like programs. I guess the difference is these look like my Grandma's quilts compressed into jewels, like Babylonian cylinder seals you can roll out their patterns to any length, threatening a mass production of precious moments.

Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

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Fecteau's like architectural navels, the "complicated pockets" like ears or industrial labia. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Notice your body shifting from exterior to interior, your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into. Look at Fecteau's early work, even the architectural models or shoe boxes always explicitly turning inside before falling back into exterior, undulating, like Bird in Space that can be phallus or colon, the confusion of interior exterior is constant, they are rotatable, spin, find yourself wandering their curvature inwards to find yourself outwards again, inside-out and proleptic.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi

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The Otto-Knappian nostalgia glossed contemporary palette's palatability makes her recycling fun. We get its depictions at the remove we can respect them. Modernism in a dark lens so we can talk about it without being it. With the ethereal silver surface appending some Last Year at Marienbad memory as surrealism. They're backdrops to us looking, sort of ingratiating you as the actor to them.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Tomma Abts at greengrassi

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Even just 2 years ago Abts still seemed an island of jilted tight trompe-leoil abstraction perhaps only harking back to the much forgotten "abstract illusionists" or all the way to constructivists. But the rise of tight-knit illusionist abstraction, in say Braunig or Orion Martin as much as Owens among others, makes Abts seem less hermitically sealed as the reference - if not influence - spreads in the reaction against mass-processed abstraction and toward slow-abstraction and icon illusionism.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

Ellen Gronemeyer at greengrassi

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Shio Kusaka at greengrassi



I mean of course these look good. Great even. To roll one in your hands. All the bright desire of commodity souvenirs - their cute lovable simplicity, the love of refuse, the handmade, the cutsey irrelevance in a line. The tiny sculpture trick. The Richard Scary one of each kind trick.
The Artworld always has exactly one ceramist, and one could find a conspiracy in this with the passing of that other major clay-man, her emerging as he was passing into history. It’s a like a tenured position: The Artworld’s ceramist. Not that Kusaka isn’t good, but rather where are the others, there must be some, can’t just be one potter.