Ull Hohn at MD 72

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Rejecting his professor, Richter's, coldly specific subjects Hohn's landscapes instead descend toward their complete loss into Ross's soft vagueness, the oblivion of whatever cheese substance grows cultural memory (the kitsch landscape existing in everyone's mind). From the specifics of an actual living plant to gross bloated inaccuracy of "tree" for the expediency of a television audience. This hanging threat of a signifier's total loss to this cultural oblivion, becoming a cliche of a cliche or in the case of the Revision series - in which the artist meticulously remade paintings he had made before any artistic training - the self, but delaying it even momentarily, is its tenderness even at its own cruelty.


See too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, “Atlas” at MOTINTERNATIONAL, Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

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In the mist of Berlin's fashion for press released in Ashbery poetics, Carpenter plops a desiccant earnestness, to clear the fog and expose the mildew of this all growing old. Carpenter has always been master of framing houses of cards, where any breath of thought topples, the whole thing must be moved with care, but here instead contextualizes with a single vantage's solemnity so dry it may lack compassion for us (what Carpenter ex doesn't), but posits an agreeable proposition: we've read Marx wrong, a disservice to the auratic objects of capital arranged so commonly speculated upon as "anonymous." And so, "By combining the single works into non-allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph" a description of most artworks today, asserting that we need a new language for it, and assembling arrangements of luxurious object as a mockery of it, art's attempting to totemize the objects of capital as an occult other, a mistake if there ever was one, and Carpenter has an essay forthcoming for that, and we'll all look forward to that.

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Projects, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel