Leda Bourgogne, Ida Ekblad at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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The excess physicality in painting, the scabs one end and wall vents on the other, perhaps because we're so beholden to virtual environs that we need a new harder visceral materiality to reach across screens, so we can feel like we're feeling something other than glass.


see too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St (2) Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1), Tony Conrad's Glass

Ida Ekblad at Herald St

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Paint coagulates, a crust like Ekblad's Mr. Kellog's Cornflake Scab stuck to fine surfaces. Scabs are excess of bodily presence, we want to pick them, peel them from our elbows, remove the corpsing exuberant. It's itchy. Crust is an overpresence of material. Like Lasker's stupid strokes, a clownishness, an exaggeration of the painterly, of material, of the person for the clown, for Ekblad forcing painting to speak with a mouthful of bubble gum.



See too: Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler

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Ekbladian horror, the confidence of antagonist, of clowning amok, berating sense with maniacism. Composition used to have a sense, a logic, it genteel and formed, now the kids these days they spray kat litter, kick at walls, crust manga felines. The fun of this willful negligence, that, if those in power can be exonerated for gross incompetence, rise to the highest upon guilt free souls, it feels good to be an artist an able to do the same, love them for it.


See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St. Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe

Ida Ekblad at Herald St.



Having just mentioned painters hands lost in the turning of printing presses painting, here Ekblad arrives making what appear as, though cannot be certified by bombastic press release’s purple prose, monoprint paintings.

Like spaghetti fallen out of pockets in embarrassment - What was once the artist’s distinct color-forms clearly delineated and arranged, what was composed, has been melted into a miasma of stringy faux-naive fuck-all mess, of neophyte graffiti dusting, of everything crumbling. Previous work’s rational ordered pleasure traded for the irrationality of the abject, anal expulsive, as orders fail and worms grow into the corpse and a dried-scab cartoon characters appear to mock your desire for some return to good taste. Their illogic is a horror. Of course half the fun is learning to love it, this next step of gross painting.
Like Josh Smith it was the brash confidence of signatory strokes that held together their flimsy palmed aesthetic. Now the brash confidence of just showing these, currently standing heads above the others racing to re-abjectify abstraction, Smith, Eichwald, Buthe, Sittg etc. etc.

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Aaron Curry at Michael Werner