Max Brand at Harkawik

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Brand soup is better than generic? The same contents with a different emphasis. An evolution of today's trends: Abstraction AND surrealism. Surrealism as abstraction. An abstraction of. Any sticker placed on these paintings would affect it none. Perhaps that's what makes them great. Like a clown punching bag, no matter what you did, it would not make the painting better or worse, the clown returns to take another from you.

Stephanie H. Shih at Harkawik

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Like Silly Putty spread across the City, the katamari of art picks up its displays, content. Gathers the city, reroutes it back into the Museum as a cultural enrichment program.  

An appreciation for the sign painter, whose vernacular does what Painting cannot: communicate without pretense, anxiety. The sign painter functions, the artist does not. "They start to scratch at what we crave: not looking like art. Because art is mannered, stillborn, cliche." The long history of artists wanting to be anything but. 

They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.

 

Sign painters: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Lauren Halsey at David Kordansky Gallery 

Darren Bader at Real Pain

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Lmao this press release is pretty good, if even only for the last line: "What is compelling here is not a proposal that these assemblages are meaningful, but that there is a chance they could be." The line is telling, much to unpack. The anxiety of things. Of their meaning. A real terror.