Michaela Eichwald at Neue Galerie Gladbeck

(link)

Has Eichwald gone pleasant? Surely there could be some critically interesting reason for the turn.. but what is it? A flower has grown from the mud? All that previous gasping intestinals, mud men, and tube brown were only mulch, to grow this? When Oehlen made his turn from swamp butt to the smeared super Crest contemporary there was something something kept, the stupidity of smearing paint. But these are pure handsome, brushed hair and all. 

See all: Michaela Eichwald

Michaela Eichwald at Marian Goodman

(link)

But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. 

Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

(link)

Giving new meaning to art that matched the couch. Painting like a potato, couch like an Erwin Wurm. They meet in handshake of our body - they both hold meat and brain, contemplation and weight. Becoming here an ouroboros, contemplating our own tail, head feast ass.

Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Michaela Eichwald at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

What is a couch but an innuendo for a body? Suggesting its shape and therefore resembling its function, a loaf. 

Michaela Eichwald at dépendance

(link)

We've all grown tired of our stomachs pumped for the lumpy biomorphics that pox contemporary art. But Eichwald at least willing to risk the true browns that those otherwise glossy ceramics cheerily self-sweeten with candy coating. Eichwald threatens actual excess, dribbles that could still stain, or, like graffiti, are already stained, vandalized. Which Eichwald's do feel, vandalized - graffiti's defecated signatures - that pink one scratched into with like a school desk's attempted Baphomet that comes out more as a hairy devil with tits, not really satanic at all. Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. This is endearing. And there's a joke in here about teenage bedsheets too, but both failed satan and besotted sheets are of that teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things. Teenagers stain things.

“J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

(link)

Paintings we bruise to reestablish some body, flesh, into the cartoon that has become pervasive, some hematoma between the lines inked to delineate ourselves. We don't want to be cartoons. Our bodies, paintings, can't take hammers like a liquid cat can.

Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley

(link)

The platter served on matters, canvas tends to absorb any spillage of material suggestiveness, but poured onto pleather paint flourishes in its implication: painters are smearing their own oily expelleds.  Like graffiti's intestinal signatures defecating their authorial, artworks that we conceptually digest while our stomachs do the same. Looking at art doesn't work if you have to take a piss, its magic is ruined by a heavy bag, so that when you try conceptualize art with your head you're still reminded of your bowel held waste, the brown rope tethering us to earth that Eichwald seems to consistently paint.



see too: John Miller at Barbara Weiss, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe

(link)

Eichwald's ability to make true atrociousness platable, fecal umbers into gastro-figuratives of the stomach churning they induce. Their recuperation of contradictory elements. Not reducible to series of gestures, not looking effortless while still holding onto their improbable coolness, a defining feature against the contemporary sea of gentle abstraction, rendered figuration and Krebberian Spinoff of everyone positioning their paintings look as though off the cuff delivered as god's conceptual ornaments; Eichwald's higherpowers far more immanent, even personal, pained efforts that even if postured still posturing a decidedly uncool thing to affect the trope of painters struggle in 2016. Making pretty paintings in no way tasteful.

See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St