Reena Spaulings. The Male Gates

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 1062 N ORANGE GROVE

Reena Spaulings. The Male Gates
14.04.2018 - 30.06.2018
Opening: 14.04.2018 18:00

Reena Spaulings: The Male Gates is an exhibition of new paintings on canvas and walk-through security gates. With a few rough coats of decorator’s enamel, devices typically installed at airports, schools, nightclubs, museums, etc., now set up a passing encounter between painting and the standardization of infrastructure. Here the technology of passage becomes a site in itself, a form that addresses the human body while trying to hold the space of the gallery like Minimalist sculpture. Five gates are installed together with a very large “seascape” made with floor-cleaning robots. This latter work translates the weird weather of late Turner using Farrow & Ball Estate Emulsions and the algorithmic scrubbing of a smart mop. Other smaller works on canvas revisit pointillism as depersonalized mark-making, repetitively adding colors until a neutral, grayish swarming starts to happen. These druggy “medusas” drift between composition and decomposition, multiplying clouds of oil and enamel points over quick acrylic underpaintings.

Years and miles of transit within the over-swollen world of art produces a feeling somewhere between jet lag, disorientation, and ennui, which in better moments can almost be mistaken for intoxication. Overfullness and echoing hollowness all at once. It’s not just that a world in flight and in fragments is only held together by a proliferation of drugs, apps, therapies, and other checkpoints, but that fragmentation has become the precondition and very engine of control, male or otherwise. This is a perception that verges on the psychedelic, especially when we consider how every new safe space already announces the wildness and unmanageability of the real.

Also on view are two new marble sculptures: a surfboard made with the same blue stone that Adolf Loos chose for the Semler House in Pilsen, Czech Republic, and a tombstone-like boogie board.

Reena Spaulings is the name of an artist collective, an art gallery, and a collaboratively written novel. Founded in New York in 2004, the artist collective has worked in a range of modes, including concerts, translations, and live performances, as well as more traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture. Reena Spaulings has been the subject of exhibitions at numerous galleries and museums, including Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2017), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2008), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2007). Group exhibitions include “Optik Schröder II” at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (2018), “Painting 2.0” at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2016), “Pop Life” at Tate Modern in London (2009), and the Whitney Biennial in New York (2006).

Reena Spaulings: The Male Gates is on view at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.