Nikolas Gambaroff at Schiefe Zähne

(link)

As far as drab shows, this one designates the criteria, midcareer artist shooting himself in the foot to prove the town he's still capable of blood, thought. You have to be righteously in awe. Unsure whether to be happy with the lack of convertibles and toupees or designate this as artistic such.


See too: Nikolas Gambaroff at The Kitchen, Nickolas Gambaroff at Galerie Meyer Kainer

Nikolas Gambaroff at The Kitchen

(link)

An exhibition filled with robots that run enchantingly around the space because of a play the artist might have read but at least heard about which is unstageable and art loves stuff like that and but the play really has almost nothing to do with the exhibition - except for its connection to our current political moment thereby connecting these lovable bots as somehow now attached to our political moment - a talking point to excuse the use of 3k$ robots running around the space and documenting themselves and the exhibition and a few artworld famous people (how many can you name?) and basically the whole thing is an excuse for the expensive paintings as set dressing, except the robot play is really the set dressing for the paintings which are characters in a global theater of currency as painting being traded the world over, is how I understand it.

Nikolas Gambaroff - Galerie Meyer Kainer



In 2010, Gambaroff - just prior to his explosion as cool-art-darling - was making mugs printed with, what would become, his signature slack non-signature, the no-assed squiggle of someone who just can’t be made to care about whatever his authorship might connote, making mugs printed with this, and using these souvenir mugs as literal building-blocks. But the symbolism was oppressive, and Gambaroff, in a moment of what must have been white-hot ecstatic brilliance, stripped the metaphorical baggage and, compressing with coal-into-diamond tightness, conjured pictorially perfect gems, selling as fast as god’s chariots would allow, running into each new exhibition with the all permutations of his painting emissions, and swapping in with each installation gimmickry to keep it looking slightly fresh, as if to prove the immaculate concepts of his on-an-on-ism, a little pro-bono work to help the real coins get passed from behind the installation-as-commodity-camouflage, and evolving with the slow pace of modernist painter getting ready for what to do with his seminal vestiges next, and continued this way ‘till now, here again in front of your face again, 4 years later for the 7th or 8th time.

Currently instead of newspapers and advertorials we have comic book pages, the famous ones from Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow, reduced to sticky ruination wallpaper; and a new variant on the Oulipo-poetry-press-release hiding that even if there were something to say, it would have been the same non-thing for tenth time now, eye-rollingly, whatever; and then the addition of some game-boards to talk about instead, something about social relations, eye-rollingly, a metaphor so symbolically ham-fisted that you wish he had just made it really clear and printed them with what they were always made to say inspite of brushy ineptitude, the gameboards: Sorry.