Review-Border crossings Mag April 2024

Nicole Eisenman

Installed at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Nicole Eisenman’s retrospective “What Happened” begins at the top of the staircase. If this sounds insignificant, think of the staircase as a threshold. Below is Eisenman’s world filled with lumpy and bumpy, scrawny and stiff bodies bending to the physical and emotional demands of social, environmental, emotional and economic collapse. Everything struggling—oozing, derelict, forlorn and completely entranced in a grim combination of survival and demise. In contrast we, I, the viewer, stand upright and above, neatly contained in our clothing, safely outside the goings-on of the artist’s tragi-comic story beneath. It’s a false sense of security, however, created only to be shattered as we, I, the viewer, descend the steps and confront, artwork by artwork, the pungent mess of our doing. We are the monsters in Eisenman’s quasi-fiction.

Fighting for a first look are two large figurative sculptures caught in the throes of what we used to call “blue-collar” work. They’re called Procession, 2019–20. To the left of the stairs a lumbering figure made of dirtied plaster bends on all fours with hands in front as if in worship. Its feet hang uncomfortably off the edge of a rolling cart with four square tires, warmed by blue and red holey hockey socks. The contraption is pulled by simple rope tied around the hand and head of a giant with a lead-grey body. The hulk also dons snorkel gear with cans of Bumble Bee tuna hanging off the air tube. On the back of the crouching figure, a heap of cotton batting feathers and orange-brown goop closely resembles a large seabird and its nest. The bird fishes off the back of the prostrating figure, not with its beak (it’s gone limp) but instead with a red pole and plastic coffee lids for bait. Together the figures perform a dom/sub relationship, one on their knees in a binding collar and the other controlling all movement. This sculpture is a contemporary allegory of power and exchange, with only the most meagre of rewards.

Review-Border crossings Mag Jan 2024

Lauryn Youden

It’s often only in works of art that we catch a glimpse of truth, even if vague and between many layers. For the exhibition “Venus in Scorpio” hosted by Open Forum in Berlin, Lauryn Youden made five new sculptures with a focus on revealing the inner workings of oppressive systems and their histories—those that continue to control and repress disabled and/or chronically ill bodies. Surprising for this writer (an able-bodied woman), Youden’s investigation manifested in a medical quadra-cane, a trampoline and four Le Corbusier designer chairs—the latter converted from widely praised models of efficiency, functionality and design to objects of deceit. Suspended from the ceiling via sexy black BDSM ropes and bejewelled with a mix of queer anime pics, charms, sex toys and medical accoutrements, their designer forms and materials— chrome-finished steel, rawhide and leather—began to expose the patriarchal ideologies inherent in their design. Using the language of Pharma-Fetish-Crip, Youden forces these furnishings away from the illusion of “form follows function” toward the exclusionary and dominant system of able-bodied culture.

Bitch I’m a Cow, 2023, is a sculpture. It’s made from a Corbusier lounger with brown and white rawhide upholstery. It hangs on its side and low to the ground from two thick, black bondage ropes recalling an oblique human body. The artist’s inquiry into the concept of a “cure” expresses itself here (and in the other sculptures) in a relentless stitching-up and obsessive addition of objects. In this work, holes in the rawhide are sewn shut, and partially consumed pill packets and prescription boxes are stitched into the surface—crude and temporary solutions to both a chair in disrepair and a body in distress. In case the title of the work wasn’t clear, Youden made a second attempt at reconstituting the animal once behind the skin by fashioning a tail from braided straw and basting it to the end of the chair.

Review-Art review magazine Feb 2024

Nora Turato

Is Here to Help

Walking through this exhibition is like thumbing a self-help book written by algorithms… in 1980. Alchemising fragments of language found in everyday experience, but specifically those that read as inner dialogue or pop psychology, the Croatia-born, Amsterdam-based artist’s show features five glossy enamel-painted multipanelled works with text in the artist’s own serif font (designed with Sam de Groot and Kia Tasbihgou) and, behind them, a site-specific painting that covers the walls. The latter, blanked in places by the gallery windows, becomes clear with a bit of effort – ‘UNDEFINE YOURSELF’, it reads in royal blue letters. One would never know that the phrase was hand-painted using Turato’s bespoke stencils, and maybe that’s the point. As the statement suggests, this work erases any evidence of the body (and its imperfections).

Hung directly on top of this matt-finish wall painting are five high-gloss enamel paintings with texts that read as either opposing or reinforcing voices. The panel nearest the entrance, not yourself? what have you done to yourself? (all works 2023), layers a fine black grid over a caramel-coloured background with a large, cherry-red circle containing the titular text. The perspectival grid turns the circle into a globe. And as it cinches tighter at the edges, the writing appears to bulge. At the bottom and in lowercase, the answer to the question is another question, ‘what have you done to yourself?’ Here as elsewhere in her work, Turato – a trained graphic designer – uses colour and font to manipulate inflection, adopting multiple but seemingly connected voices to explore meaning and its absence.