Chim↑Pom at ANOMALY

(link)

We have invented forms of wreckage we find enjoyable.

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

(link)

"She utilizes the brown hued bluntness of the German palette – a favorite of 18th century genre painters through to Anselm Kiefer – as if it were a genre all its own."

That's pretty good. And one would wish for a listing of von Wulffen's does with color and painting that feel so egregiously like painting trauma, its history of abuses, like that bic pen blue that smears out of the clouds, the eruptions of full ROYGBIV rainbows of colors unnecessary. Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house.

Past: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

"We try to make the body reappear and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about. Our cartoon bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."


Click: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

Darren Bader at Blum & Poe

(link)

The buggery performed, inhabiting another's space with full cavity examination. Or more blurb friendly, Bader becomes Hannibal Lecter, less appropriation than a forcible taking of skins, wearing them like a costume to be paraded. A mere container for Bader's acting. Wool, Catala, Spaulings, Gonzalez-Torres, Ruscha, Albenda, Andre, and probably etc.

Possibly the reason a lot of artists hate Bader, besides the general impishness, is the refusal to perform any sort of critical consolidation of his practice, that moral underpinning of art, "criticality," (that ethic reproduced in art school).  Instead, at the cost of any "critical" structure, a near incessant expansion. His ability to take. Any of Bader's "good ideas" are buried in an avalanche of "any idea." Bader is exhausting.  A lot of artists - despite whatever art's claims to freedom, and ostensible rejection of cultural values - wouldn't let themselves behave half this stupidly. The criticism is perhaps that acting stupidly isn't really freeing, but really neither is what most artists do anyway. Mirrors are best when they are stupid.


see too:
Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 2, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes. Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 1

Jill Mulleady at Galerie Neu

René Magritte, Le galet, 1948; Evelyne Axell L'égocentrique 2 1968"; Theo Wenner, Miley Cyrus Rolling Stone Cover, 2013; Jill Mulleady, The Discovery, 2018

(link)

Things burble up, ghosts drift like flotsam up through the flow of images, us all treading water not wanting to drown in this subconsciousness the PR threatens. Drowning in soup haunted, like a purgatory. Paintings become disfigured, gargoyles misremembered, using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us.

Leidy Churchman at Reena Spaulings

(link)

"the 'manure of experience.'"
"an 'extraordinary junkyard' of symbols,"
"a disconcerting heterogeneity at first glance,"
"individually rich but collectively inscrutable."

Past: Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein

"'Heterogeneity' in painting, the lack of identifiable style, of painterly identity, that has become increasingly common, shifting subjects, means and themes, we find still neurotic - still being mentioned in PR. It's conversant spectacle, finger to the viewer, who is asked to sort it out. This avoidance of identity, could be argued as an abdication of responsibility, but like the fish before left well enough alone, the distance asks for understanding that we aren't required to, and can't, know."

Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein

Leidy Churchman at Rodeo