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

Jeanette Mundt at Overduin & Co.

(link)

Of gymnasts, the paintings lack their subject's deftness. Motion is given to a square smear. Instead Mundt's exude something permanently flat, dry. A relation to their subject is ambivalent despite their load. Mundt often targets content that is full of juice, yet is left on canvas to fall apart. A gap that reviewers seem unable to fill with their own: Travis Diehl seemed to conjure the process of glaucoma's blindness; Tess Edmonson said about the film on which a painting was based: "the gallerist warned me not to watch it"; and Zoë Lescaze aptly called it "ready for viewers and critics to plot their opinions onto her body." Her body of work which fails to deliver on the subject. Failure isn't an interesting painting strategy in 2019 - we did that ten years ago -  but maybe a generous read is that these aren't so much failing as crumpling, like car hitting its subject.