June 27 to August 12, 2016
531 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 9100

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In “Shapeshifters,” now at Luhring Augustine, 19 artists are brought together who explore the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay “Art and Objecthood,” though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, such as Martin Kippenberger, for example, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, as in Jeremy DePerez’s Untitled (Unknown) (2016), or in working with one form or another, such as Imi Knobel’s Kartoffelbild 15 (2012) leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

Among the large-scale works in the main gallery, David Novros’s extraordinary 4:30 (1966/2000) is a multipanel painting that extends horizontally in four joined parts, two panels running horizontal and two at an angle. The parts are stepped alternately, allowing the wall to form inducted negative shapes to the positive shapes of the panels themselves. The pale tone of the white pearlescent paint changes color to a pink as the viewer moves and the light hits its surface differently. The modular panels identify the piece as an object within an architectural context — it’s as far away from the notion of painting as a window onto fictional space as can be imaged. This is now nothing to do with a perspectival view set in a rectangular portal; it is an encounter with organized physical elements in real space. Above the doorway to the other galleries is Blinky Palermo’s Untitled (1966) a nine-by-eighteen-inch black triangle of muslin over wood. This small work punctuates the architecture like a subtle votive object, altering the straightforward experience of passing through a doorway into a consideration of passing through a particular architectural space.

Several paintings in this exhibition very successfully use actual gaps within the format of the painting itself: Kippenberger’s N.G.D. hellblau (1987), Richard Tuttle’s Red Brown Canvas (1967), and Steven Parrino’s Touch and Go (1989–95) all expose the wall behind within the painting to simple, and inventive effect. Parrino’s work shows painterliness in the form of stains and drips visible along the edges and in two cut-out segments. Ruth Root combines, in Untitled (2015), fabric, Plexiglas, enamel and spray paint in a piece that fits various planes at diagonals to each other that only in the top left corner conform to a rectangle. Elsewhere they simply amass frontally as if slotted and layered together. The feel is collage, the format a construction from disparate parts.

Although stacked vertically, like Root’s painting, 3 Part Variation #5 (2011–13) by Joanna Pousette-Dart departs methodologically. Three conjoined rounded forms contain curvilinear shapes; the relationship between them is seamless, as they appear to generate one another. The color relationships are also compelling; again, moving visually backward and forward, the colors seem to call each other into being.

There is no doubt that the artist list for this exhibition could be longer, I’m thinking for example of Joe Overstreet, Alan Shields and Al Loving, to name just three. There is much very good work to be seen already here and the point is well made that a standard rectangle is not only unnecessary, but alternatives await further exploration in any number of directions and for many reasons — one being that there is no good reason not to.

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It feels at first like Tom Friedman’s exhibition of new work, on view at Luhring Augustine in Bushwick, might be playing a trick on viewers. But it isn’t smoke and mirrors, it’s paint and Styrofoam. All of it; there’s nothing but those two elements adorning the gallery walls and floor. Yet it appears like there must be something more in the mix. There’s so much precision, so much detail. A microphone, chair and guitar without strings stand in one corner. It takes pretty close inspection to confirm that the wood grain is, in fact, the work of a paintbrush. In faux-assemblage wall pieces like Blue (all 2014) and Toxic Green Luscious Green — each comprised of a single color, with a dense section of detritus either clinging to the top edge or falling to the bottom — it seems unbelievable that everything collected in the messy, three-dimensional pile of scraps is only made out of the materials proclaimed by the exhibition’s title. The apple-core, the slice of pizza, the paper plane — all from flimsy Styrofoam?

Since the early ‘90s Friedman has been exhibiting his brand of inventively fabricated sculptures, which have drawn comparisons to 1960s Conceptualism, Arte Povera and Minimalism. But his work fits into none of these categories completely. Taking many different forms, they are unified by the nature of the material they are made from — inexpensive, ubiquitous and disposable — and the great care Friedman takes in crafting them. Earlier works (not on display here) have included an untitled self-portrait from 2000, appearing to be the artist’s body splattered on the floor after a horrific accident; it is painstakingly cut out of colored construction paper. Another self-portrait is carved out of a single aspirin. Thirty-thousand toothpicks stuck together form a giant starburst. Fishing line, sugar cubes, plastic cups, chewed bubblegum, roasting pans and soap inlaid with pubic hair have all been fodder for Friedman’s transformative hand.

As with those earlier pieces, here it’s in making something to marvel at, using very ordinary elements, that delights viewers at the outset. Despite one’s skepticism, assistants at the gallery assure that all the works in “Paint and Styrofoam” are made purely from these two resources. And the works here really are marvelous, but for reasons beyond their material trickery.

Each wall piece is monochromatic — frame (also carved of Styrofoam) and all. Tonal variations are created by texture and shape. What becomes clear is that Friedman is, in effect, painting with form. In Blue Styrofoam Seascape, the distinction between ocean and sky is made by the cusp of a subtle, beveled vertex that juts out towards the viewer, drawing a horizon directly across the baby blue surface. The sea darkens as it recedes, forming a perfect division between water and air.

Similarly, the self-portrait created for this exhibition is painted meticulously. The artist wears glasses and has a feather in his hat, looking out over his shoulder. It’s also painted in a blindingly bright canary yellow. Detail comes from the paint’s texture, as it does in the work exhibited directly to the left. That painting, Night, is recognizable to the viewer at once. It’s Van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece Starry Night replicated exactly, down to the folded canvas edges, but painted not on canvas, of course, and devoid of any color except for a tarry blackish-blue.

A bite-sized nick in the corner of the outwardly standard white plinth, upon which a bulbous, Pepto-Bismol pink sculpture snakes toward the ceiling, is the only moment that Friedman reveals what’s behind the curtain. About a foot off the ground, the break in the stand reveals just a few inches of the foamy, aerated plastic that’s all around, but covered everywhere else in a solid layer of acrylic paint.

Friedman refers to the wall works as “sculptures of paintings.” With the chipped plinth in mind, one can’t help but feel that the floor works are likewise sculptures of sculptures. They imitate what is traditionally found in an exhibition space: paint, canvases, frames, pedestals, items of worth and value because of their material expense, maker’s name, or historical significance. Some of these elements are here, legitimately. Others are a careful emulation of what we expect to see. But each piece asks to be questioned, opening exploration into the space between what is actually present and what can be seen.

The post What It Is: Juliet Helmke on Tom Friedman appeared first on artcritical.

Please also join us for the next panel, on January 24, with Hrag Vartanian, Christina Kee and Christian Viveros-Faune.

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Joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Tam Van Tran at Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe, Shinique Smith at James Cohan, Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine, and Bernard Frize at Pace Gallery

The post March 2013: Ellie Bronson, Jonathan Goodman and John Yau with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

September 11-October 16, 2010
531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-206-9100

Providing an immersive experience through the lush use of color, images, and sound is a signature of Pipilotti Rist’s installations. Captivating and disorienting, her current show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Heroes of Birth, completely transforms the three-room gallery space, as only Rist can, yet it falls short of her own high standards, an innocuous version of earlier work.

Upon entering the gallery you are wrapped in warm pink light and pulled into another world. All or Nothing (alles oder nichts) (2010), in the entry gallery is an altar-like installation, comprised of a three-part video screen, with offerings of grains, fruit, flowers, and a water dispenser with cups displayed below on a minimal white shelf.  On each visit to the show I found myself spending the most time with this simple piece which offers the viewer a moment to pause and reflect before entering the interior gallery. The video on display, a candy colored kaleidoscope of twirling hands and bouncing male genetalia, is mesmerizing, hilarious, and slightly embarrassing. Meanwhile the food and drink give you an excuse to stand and stare for a while. Inside the main gallery space, Layers Mama Layers (2010) is a multifaceted and slightly overwhelming installation. A video of fluffy sheep frolicking on lush green hills is projected onto and through four gossamer sheets of white fabric that have been hung from the ceiling. Fluorescent green circular patterns grow to fill the room, then recede. The sounds of a slowly tinkling music box fill the room eerily. Walking through the rows, the videos are projected through each sheet of fabric and onto you and the other viewers, resulting in an entirely cohesive yet disorienting experience.

The body parts from All or Nothing return in the back gallery, in the form of wallpaper. A human kaleidoscope lines the walls of a room lit by Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), a hanging structure crafted from pairs of large, unsexy underwear.  This room is also filled with the innocent sounds of the music box, but the chandelier overshadows the other works in this gallery. Lit both from within and by colored lights projected onto the sculpture, Massachusetts Chandelier is funny, disturbing, and quite beautiful in an off-putting way, but is conceptually flat.  Like the green graphic patterns in the main gallery, this piece feels decorative, a visually enthralling and funny way to fill space.

Themes of childhood, sexuality, and gender are threaded throughout the work, but no clear stance has been taken on any of these contentious issues. New techniques and tools are employed in Heroes of Birth, providing a trippy, out-of-body-experience, but the imagery feels recycled from Rists’ previous work.

Her massive installation at the Museum of Modern Art last year, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), for example, impressively transformed MoMA’s cold, modernist atrium into a swirl of hot pink light, and large-scale moving images of nature. Each aspect of the installation, including the rounded projector casings on the wall, the donut-shaped couch with soft cushions, and video projections of fruits, flowers and a female figure, were a gentle yet subversive move against the inherent masculinity of such art institutions. In a review in New York Magazine that was brimming with girly adjectives, Jerry Saltz declared that “Rist makes the institution ovulate.”

More explicitly sexual than Pour Your Body Out, Heroes of Birth is engaging in the use of dichotomous imagery: the masculine and feminine, salacious and infantile are all mashed together. Yet the show is a watered down version of what we know the artist can do.  The work is titillating and enjoyable, but not as subversive or profound as Rist can be.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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Trying to fail has played a major role in the work of Albert Oehlen, the midcareer painter from Germany. Convinced that painting sets out either to build up or tear down, Oehlen went so far as to paint a portrait of Hitler in 1986—mostly to see whether such a work might be successful from a propaganda point of view today. By his own admission, the work failed terribly; however, he also made the point that such a failure was intended. He said in a 1999 interview: “it really is a disaster somehow, but was meant for that.” By concentrating on the content of the painting, its ability to reify a reputation, Oehlen escapes the impartiality of a formalist approach, something that he has consistently turned away from. His achievement as a theorist of what art contains has allowed him to experiment with painting as if it were only a vehicle for political attitudes. The painting thus depends on the social resolve of the artist, who informs the composition with materials that can be read for their political bias rather than for their formal properties.

In Oehlen’s current show, he uses Spanish advertisement posters as his ground: his decision to do so may well reflect an ongoing decision to quite literally paint over advertising’s seductiveness. Oehlen covers the commercial imagery without obliterating it completely, yet the results feel very much like a critique of advertising. Interestingly, the paintings are often sumptuous in their presentation—despite his determination to fail, Oehlen’s esthetic yields, even if unknowingly, to some formalist discourse. We know of course that the nullity of a deliberately nonvisual language has been part of postmodern painting for some time now, and Oehlen’s art falls directly into a general critique of painting’s intentions. In his Mujer (2008), a large oil-and-paper work on canvas, broadly expressionist strokes, in red and green and brown and mauve, disfigure and partially obscure a headless, armless, legless red and black female figure, with the word “Mujer” beneath. The advertisement poster of the women’s torso acts as a foil for the destructive aspect of Oehlen’s intervention, which is a scramble of overlapping colors that issue out to the left of where the woman’s heart would be. Oehlen’s negation of the picture seems to me a primarily political act, albeit one with ramifications for current painting debates.

In Ice (2008), another large oil and paper on canvas, Oehlen uses an upside down advertisement for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream as the center of his painting. There is also a series of letters in a formal script that run across the center of the painting; they are hard to decipher and seem to exist for organizational purposes. Beneath this imagery are a series of broad yellow stripes whose tops are set by a curving black line. Separated by thin white stripes, these repeated bands of color barely influence the painting’s major action, which consists of the covering over of the ice cream ad. It is as if Oehlen wished to do away with the visual language of consumerism but has found the prospect daunting, even impossible to bring about. The best he can do is to partially destroy the image he has chosen for himself. Sin (2008) consists of a sign with those letters, although only the right edge of the “s” can be seen; to its right is a poster for a musical tour, again with its center covered over by formless smudges of tan and blue paint. Is the painting a warning of some sort, or does it merely randomly incorporate letters that happen to spell out a word in English? Interestingly, both readings seem plausible, allowing Oehlen room to deny and reinforce sense in the same moment. This is work whose intellectual implications—and consequences—are of a very high order.

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Michael Brenson, Martha Schwendener, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Su-en Wong at Danese, Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham and Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protetch.

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CALDER: FROM MODEL TO MONUMENT
PaceWildenstein thru March 4, 545 W 22

PHILIP GRAUSMAN
Lohin, Geduld thru March 11, 531 W25, 212 675 2656

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin.  But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of  new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale.  A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith.  The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti.  Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

The other problem with monuments is that often the artist is making them has become a monument, too: self-important, fixed in their ways.  The paradigm of the modern sculptor ruined by success is Henry Moore—or that at least is a received wisdom endorsed recently by Rachel Whiteread, explaining in interview why she didn’t want to be typecast as the kind of artist who makes memorials.  This expectation arose in part from her successful, widely admired Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna’s Judenplatz, inaugurated in 2000 after years of planning and negotiations. You could say that her new series at Luhring Augustine represents a struggle to find a post-monumental identity.

Ms. Whiteread was a natural for the Holocaust commission (won in competition) because her often poignant art deals inherently with memory and literally with loss.  It is a strength and weakness alike of her work that her career is predicated on a singular sculptural strategy: To make solid the negative space surrounding, or more intriguingly, sometimes, inhabiting the objects from which her works are cast.

The irony with Ms. Whiteread is that, unlike 9 out of 10 sculptors, she is far more effective when struggling to produce a big, public statement than when (no pun intended) casting around for smaller ideas, making sketches, exploring tentative explorations.  The projects that really extended her are the ones that also extend her medium and the viewer’s notion of sculpture or of the very experience of things. Besides the Holocaust memorial, this would include “House,” (1993), a cast of an entire terraced house in London’s East End, shamefully demolished weeks after completion by a philistine municipality; the similar treatment of individual rooms and staircases; and her contribution to an ongoing series of temporary pieces on the vacant fourth pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square—her solution was to cast the plinth in transparent resin and mount it in reverse upon its original, a temporary apotheosis of the support, the ultimate celebration of the overlooked.

On a smaller scale, and in the works that seem spinoffs of her ambitious projects, Ms. Whiteread’s aesthetic can quickly degenerate into a boutique-version echo of itself: Elegant, occasionally suggestive, but gnawingly banal.  The Holocaust Memorial teased-out the negative space behind shelved books, a multilayered evocation of the People of the Book, the sense of missing volumes, of untold tales, of cruel statistics.  Following the commission, Ms. Whiteread turned out smaller works and variations which cheapened the memory of her original insight., At her best, Ms. Whiteread’s sculpture exploits and thus transcends the mundanity of the things in the world that occasion it; at second best, which never lurks far behind, mundanity claims her art for itself.  Maybe it is because the Whiteread casting process pushes literalism to such an extreme that it results in an aesthetic binary: the sculpture will be extraordinary or all too ordinary.

Her latest works derive from “Embankment,” (2005), an installation (which I am yet to see) in the gargantuan Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, on view through April.  This work is made around 14,000 white plaster casts of different cartons, stacked to varying heights, amongst which visitors walk.  At the smaller but still voluminous Luhring Augustine, where individual sculptures are sparsely installed, there are two bodies of work: “pure” cartons, and cartons stacked in relationship with actual, appropriated furniture.

The problem with the carton motif is that there isn’t a significant differentiation between its exterior and its interior.  In a Whiteread there can be a crucial difference between a thing cast from without and within, to imply surrounding or vacated space.  The difference with a carton is academic—wherever the cast is taken, the result in a lumpen box that looks just like a carton only it isn’t empty and isn’t made out of cardboard.

The relationship of cast to actual in works like “Wait,” (2005), where six plaster units surround a chair, or “Surface,” where a table cohabits space with four carton-shapes, seems gratuitous.  There is none of the sinister poetics of the Columbian Doris Salcedo’s collisions of cement and furniture.

For Ms. Whiteread, attention to small, banal things produces results that are small and banal.  She is no Chardin, nor even Richard Tuttle.  The act of variation merely produces upscale tschotkas.  In small fry mode she mimics her  conceptualist mentors in the casting of negative space, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys, whereas when confronting complexities, both thematic and technical, she can tap a richer vein of metaphor and association.  But don’t despair of Rachel Whiteread—just wait for the next monument.

Alexander Calder ought to be an example of a sculptor ruined by success: He was extraordinarily fecund in his early years, pioneering new sculptural forms with the mobile, the stabile, wire construction.  But exploring these further and making them bigger was no kiss of death, as a stunning show at PaceWildenstein’s second Chelsea space, leased from the Dia Foundation, makes clear.

The beauty and intrigue of Calder often has a lot to do with an inherent tension between human touch and machinist impersonality.  The son and grandson of sculptors and a trained engineer, his genius melted the distinction between art and technology.  His mobiles were “drawn” in wire, metal, found objects, often revealing a nervous, wobbly line, but then “worked,” miraculous staying aloft, floating, shimmering.

A similar dualism comes across in his late stabiles, the subject of this show.  These mammoth steel plate pieces arose from lucrative sculptural commissions during the building booms of the 1960s and 1970s.  Far from leaden or officious, however, they extended the elastic, exuberance of his mobile inventions. Actually, they knowingly riff a sense of the ponderous as circus-clown imitations of elephants and whales.  Beefy, bolted-together forms force an equation between heavy engineering and animal stockiness.

Most of the show is of working maquettes.  It is fascinating to chart upward progressions in scale when there are intermediate models to hand: “Jerusalem Stabile” (1976), for instance, a red-painted steel 1:3 model, which just shy of 12 feet high dominates the show.  A must see show, but who can explain the bizarre, pretentious catalogue which represents the works in scaleless, surfaceless, computerized graphics—defeating the whole point, I would have thought, of this otherwise thoughtful exhibition?

When it comes to a debate about intimacy and monumentality, Philip Grausman portrait sculpture throws a cat among the pigeons.  He makes images of people which are at once familiar and depersonalized, obviously born of observation and yet coolly hieratic.  They are installed in Lohin Geduld’s cramped quarters with the same dramatic effect as Ms. Whiteread and Calder are in their respective, sprawling art barns.

The heads in stainless steel are set on tubular pedestals of the same material, crowded into a back room like some Roman mausoleum.  There is something martial, even vaguely fascistic, in their polished metallic surface.  They look a bit like life masks at first, but have an animation that is only possible from sculpture worked ex nihilo.  Still, they elude the old category distinction of carving versus modeling in the way they are at once severe and fluid.

The show is dominated, however, by “Susanna,” (1996-99) a ten foot high version of a female head in fiberglass.  Dwarfing its surrounding space, it brings to mind Magritte’s surrealist fantasy of a comb and shaving brush in mammoth disproportion to its bedroom, or else romantic meditations of people amidst monumental classical ruins.  The white material has an ethereal, weightless quality, giving the woman’s serene expression a Buddha-like calm.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 2, 2006

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Through April 30, 2005

The German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997, is being celebrated with three shows in New York right now. The most interesting of these is a show of self-portraits, in various mediums, at Luhring Augustine Gallery. Kippenberger was “an 80’s artist”. That is to say he was a New Wave type, worked in many mediums (painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, performance) and bought the cult of personality package whole. Warhol is said to have been his inspiration, but comparison to any of the 80’s mega-maniacal personalities will do. Kippenberger was a terrific prankster and most of these self- portraits are intended to be funny. The show includes a wall of exhibition posters. Kippenberger loved to design posters, which always involved himself in one guise or another or some complex reference to himself through a system of symbols of personal iconography. One stand-in image for Kippenberger is Fred the Frog. A character shown here crucified, as a sculpture. Fred’s cross is made of stretcher bar wood and he clutches a beer mug, a not so subtle statement about the artist as victim and slave. The beer mug, cans of beer, cocktail glasses and many other references to alcohol are throughout the show. Kippenberger was the proverbial pathetic but lovable alcoholic and using the domesticated vernacular of drunk jokes openly admits it and makes fun of it at the same time. He’s playing the fool  (in the Shakespearean sense) and the unrepentant punk. The fact that Kippenberger played briefly in a raucous rock band is no surprise. What is a surprise, however, is how beautiful and even deeply poetic much of the work is, especially the paintings. They are all made in the eighties or early nineties and even though they have a lot of the look of painting of that period; dry (rather like David Salle), thick brush work (rather like Julian Schnabel), distorted  (like any number of people), they also have a lot of graphic punch and real pathos. The color is generally off key and intense enough to create optical frisson. The drawing is either close to realistic or cartoonishly abbreviated. The artist is usually pictured trying to perform some kind of work related impossibility or at the edge of mental dissolution. His appearance in the self- portraits varies wildly from overweight confused old nut to svelte post punk prankster. The props depicted in the paintings include the stand by cocktail glass, a hangman’s noose and artists’ tools, all are a menace. Kippenberger never hesitated to make a monkey out of himself and he’s more beloved than ever for doing it.

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