Alex Becerra at Karma International

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IN 2014 Alex Becerra was titling exhibitions "problematic whores" and getting reviews in Frieze and LA Times. Lauding him for "the self-granted freedom ... that no white artist would dare put his name to.""clearly feel[ing] no pressure to self-censor, which is a rare thing today, not just amongst artists." Now almost 10 years later the paintings are tame and the "reviews" come from culture magazines. It's a classic shift of the painter entering midcareer yes, but also a measure of how the art world has childproofed itself. No more edge, is it growing up or growing old?

Simone Fattal at Karma International

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Part of being amorphous, blobby, is that it gives nothing to hang on to. Vagueness becomes shield, defenses, an outer wall to climb like glass, nothing to hang onto, where are the suction cups, what words can you append. Attempts describing rocks, they seem impervious to all general description. We individuate them by saying they look like other things, otherwise they're just rocks. This is somehow meaningful. 

Ser Serpas at Karma International

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Think of milk congealing a skin. Objects, things, threaten a flesh, the hoarder begins to see objects as a living thing, requiring compassion. Canvas like animal skins. "We disavow our excretory bodies  because they are signs of disorder, remindersof the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death: 'Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver...'"


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

K8 Hardy at Karma International

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30 seconds of video, and images through glass, of a lifetime of outfits, enjoy your daily contemporary art.

Markus Oehlen at Karma International

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1985, Kuspit; Artforum:

"Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen

METRO PICTURES

I admire these artists quirkiness, irreverence, and contempt. I first saw their work several years ago in Germany, and I’m glad to see they’ve become still more perverse or saucy, to use a word they like. One can label their work neo-Dadaist, which suggests that their attitude is more important than the objects they make. Certainly they seem to aspire to become sacred monsters, although that’s nothing you can work at, even when you have command of seemingly limitless reserves of (Dadaist) disgust; the world makes your monstrousness happen.
However large the range of their activities—they write as well as make music—it is as painters that these artists exist in New York. No doubt their painting is just another kind of performance, but it leaves behind a deliciously smelly residue. It is this odor of garbage that attracts us. We sense that the artists are trying to set painting right after it has betrayed us by pretending that it can become attractive flesh hanging in museums and apartments. Garbage must be garbage, in the name of the honest truth; this claim of authenticity is a traditional one, like many others around today, but it’s harder to resist than the others, for history and art history’s pile of garbage continues to grow. Compost heaps are never out of fashion. These young Germans, like true youth everywhere, are obsessed with the decay of both art and meaning, which they have decided to enjoy with as many crocodile tears as possible. They have seen through everything; they know the shiftiness of everything; they know shit is the only substance eternally present. They quote Dali with approval: “I don’t like it when something goes in the nose and comes out the anus, but I love that which slips in the anus and exits through the eye.” They have restored paranoia to its original anality, making images and meanings, and of course paint, into so much shit they playfully offer the world that has mothered them.
[...]
I prefer not to take them seriously, though, but to enjoy their spiteful antibourgeois satire as part of the eternal return of shit.

"

The shit, for Markus Oehlen, a toolboxing of cultural forms slapped in maximalist congealings of it, forced to eat it all, more Charline von Heyl but directed by James Cameron. 

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

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As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer. The attractive pink, the technologic jargon. This exhibition showcases among other things "Anemine" "a new generation of medical products" that are synthesized chlorocruorins, oxygen-binding hemeproteins found in many annelids, manufactured green worm-blood essentially.* A portion of the afternoon googling substances, phylums, blood hemotypes, the only results for Anemine are Rosenkranz and a German electronic artist. Maybe Anemie really is that medically cutting edge, but noted about earlier of Rosenkranz by Abreu itself: the substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha of long long line of products and "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine, from InfoWars guy to Tom Brady's longtime personal trainer hawking products with vague but powerful claims. So long the as the promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, all seeming to counteract the very real issues of Atrazine and xenoestrogen, though Obama did not turn the "frickin' frogs gay." Look at the Bosch-like extraction of Horseshoe Crab blood chopped in half and bleeding out in dungeon apparatuses into jars for highly valuable medical technology, for blue blood, so it's not hard to imagine research extracting green worm blood for sport, and for an artist to get the good idea to make paintings with. "gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." Horror film foreboding, green blooded insectoids, the large company willing to make money of its extraction, everything there for a real good narrative.

*Synthetic blood is currently being developed and has actually been created before, though though never approved for use anywhere outside of South Africa. A side effect was noted to be flatulence. 




See too: Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Cali Thornhill Dewitt at Karma International

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“Low-level advertising really speaks to me because it’s so forthright. All the information is there, there’s no bullshit..”

Kanye's Saint Pablo Tour merch designer and probably-not murderer of curt Cobain, Cali Dewitt here with his hammering textual effigies. The phrases, deprived of all context, still haunt. A good phrase is like a magic spell, an incantation, it makes itself truer every time you say it, saying it conjures its ghost into being. This rattling emptiness so apt to Kanye's merch, is perhaps the lovely subterfuge of Dewitt, hollowness doesn't preclude impact horribly.


see too: Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster

Flannery Silva at Karma International

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Ah, the finicky objects of procreation whose any naturalism is disinfected by its immediate costuming, the stage dressing, theatrics, an ornamented Matryoshka that will soon be its own cradle for shells treated like the dolls we are taught to believe them to be, making a show of such objects.

Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

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“Rather, Fleury represents her desire precisely as it is a far more interesting strategy  of ultimate passivity, not unlike Lacan’s slave/master relationship whereby the slave’s freedom depends precisely upon a position of submission and resignation to the order of power. It must be understood  that there is not the slightest critique, analysis or satire involved in Fleury’s presentation of her shopping bags or display of show and their boxes; this is her shopping presented as it is, and the radicality of this act is precisely in its divorce from any intention or argument, political, social, or cultural. This strategy may be as disturbing as Donald Judd’s vision of a new art based on absolute anti-emotion. In fact Judd’s visibility seems, in some weird, insane and impossible manner, akin to Fleury’s, both of them attracted to artificial shiny and fetishistic materials, both utterly opposed to Romantic formulas of nature and naturalism, to the ideal of “authenticity.” “Things that exist, exist, and everything is on their side.” Judd’s formula perfectly desires Fleury’s own project in which “thingness” is allowed to resonate by itself without further intervention.

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire “whateverism” which ups the ante on American “Slacker” culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”

-Adrian Dannatt

See too:  Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation, Group Show at David Kordansky

Urban Zellweger at Karma International

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The PR rapidfires the names of 6 painters in prayer against thinking the critically uncool Salvador Dali or Yves Tanguy. Look, the desert dreamscape and droopy floating globule of Surrealism is coming back and that's alright. It's picked up a lot of Germanic influence along the way and its slick enterprise seems more at least somewhat tempered by the internally reflective.

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International



The ham-fisted literalness of the symbolic desubmlimation is endearing. Taking viagra and spraying paint? A “serum-like polyester medium”? On Aluminum? Like a Paul Mcarthy Painter conducting Rob Pruitt jest, its a nosegay for painting’s seminal male vestige. Taking Viagra to paint? it would be funny if it weren’t so embarrassingly literal. But its self-debauch rendering the shame neuter in the meta-irony of self-flagellatory act.
And the Press Release is fun to read: “Viagra has acted as a substitute for alternative remedies and saved many animals that might have been poached... Tiger Penis Soup for example...”
“How does ingesting Viagra then affect the act, the painting? Under the influence of the Sildenafil... Those who observed .. say that her complexion appeared to glow with a strange red flush.”
It's like every high school boy's childhood bedroom.