Kyung-Me at Bureau & Silke Otto-Knapp at The Renaissance Society

(KM, SOK)

One has its own internal world; one uses your internal world. You look into Kyung-Me's, awaiting you is a little snow globe of a world inside it. But the other reflects you, displays vessels for your pour over. Its why Otto-Knapp's feel like memories, they're projection screens for home films of your - like Koether - cultural baggage.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi, Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin

Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin

Yesterday's brand strategies reemerge in painting's today. Mona Lisa handbags, af Klimt on a tank, Carl Andre halloween costumes. You can't water down a public's desire for a painting, prevalence increases the throngs lined to see it, at distance, behind glass.  Our recognition-of is the greatest asset of a painting, proving its commonality, prerequisite to fame. Your brand should be aqueous, malleable, placed on anything while retaining the specificity distinguishing yours from the competition. Otto-Knapp's strategy doesn't seem critical of such, rather recognizing it, if a painting can harbor artistic "voice," why not a dress, a dance, a rug. Deploy it as such.


see too: Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi

Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi

(link)

The Otto-Knappian nostalgia glossed contemporary palette's palatability makes her recycling fun. We get its depictions at the remove we can respect them. Modernism in a dark lens so we can talk about it without being it. With the ethereal silver surface appending some Last Year at Marienbad memory as surrealism. They're backdrops to us looking, sort of ingratiating you as the actor to them.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz



Like the recent use of Hilma af Klint as fashion, her totems of spirituality becoming themselves symbol-patterns printed on dresses and totes worn as cultural baggage, Otto-Knapp shortcuts this droste-abyme of cultural appropriation immediately placing its icons onto its own tasteful dresses before being recirculated dancing in front of/into paintings, reinserted back into its aura. An aware circulation of aura in the contemporary brand system, re-uping Munchian mannerism for 21st century management. At what point are spirituality and the quasi-mystical retainable through the deadening pragmatics of contemporary art, in which symbols are vaporized in a Kelley Walker-esque reproduction line, and at what point is it able to retain its “irrational” function standing in opposition to the immediate rational vampire of functionary markets.