A Maior at Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto

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Our best guess, that Yu Yuan is the mother/"mistress"/owner or maybe just matriarch(?) of A Maior, the Portugal based general store* with an ostensible curatorial program, (and curating the Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto.) We're probably wrong, and probably the point is a bit of confusion, which is occasionally fun. Whoever she is she seems important. The world has championed less with more. At least some of our "mistresses" deserve billboards. It's fun to burn space to our flowers.

*Open Mondays to Saturdays, from 9:30 to 19:00. Sundays and Holidays, from 10:00 to 19:00. Selling mostly everything for your home, except food.

See too: Marte Eknæs at A MAIOR

Devin Troy Strother Smoking And Painting Broadway Gallery, New York

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"My mother loves Christmas, and she collects all sorts of Christmas-themed ceramics to decorate her home. ... There were almost never any black Santas. So, my mother took matters into her own hands. She would buy up white Santas, angels, and carolers and turn them black using a jar of enamel paint. I’ve always thought about how this was my first brush with painting, and how it has had a major impact on my thinking and art practice."

This does seem like an apt metaphor/parable(?). These paintings, they've got the color of Christmas, but with the white parts painted black. 

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Salon Berlin

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Someone once called this "bath house abstraction" - a decor for lounge couches, and Lutz-Kinoy's do often appear as the background to activities that accredit them.

Eleanor Ray Nicelle Beauchene, New York

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Painting some lost air in the "middle distance" - air infected with some ghost. A Tuymans' photograph falls toward unfocus, like lenses shifted, or just before you faint. A world though some kind of frost. The old wavy glass of Morandi's subjectivity but mictrotized, etched, woozy. Afflicted with heatstroke? A heat shimmer. Even the cold landscapes have humid hot air. The edges are liquid hard, but their interior a gooey center. And melting. Corot's plein air as locked up as a Maureen Gallace summer, seen through Morandi's glass and receding.

Past; Jamian Juliano-Villani

"Like Ernst's graphic novels cut up from the cheap illustrations of culture, surrealism and pop go in hand, the abject impoverishment of images today begets a mash-culture on amphetamines, channeling, thieving, and mixing everything and more regardless of flavor. Ingredients in the style John Wesley placed into Albert Oehlen's 3D render blender on Rosenquist's chop setting all in the backyard BBQ of Hannah Hoch. The point today is to accelerate the katamari like sludge while maintaining, like Ernst, a semblance of representational order, to make the regurgitation uncanny, seem, somehow, true..."


Full: Jamian Juliano-Villani at Tanya Leighton

Isabel Nuño de Buen at Lulu

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Assemblage by the sea. Crusted, coralized. Colors approaching, but never quite, seafoam. More a bleached shellfish reference. Sort kelp-y. My Octopus Teacher or Kevin Costner in Waterwold-core? This is the ambiguity in question. Or, maybe more associated with the crustables: Miho Dohi, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Lin May Saeed. ... wait, is this Lulu-core?

Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, Vienna

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Blinky light art, the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. The PR says as much: "ratifies a pop modernism celebrating the a priori unnatural marriage between the culture of entertainment and that, sacerdotal, of modernism. Our Clement Greenberg in TMZ sauce, restages the epic formalist quest for flatness, infused with pop calibrated for iPhones."

The culturally accredited mall.

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke