Ulrike Müller
Sadie Benning
Sadie Benning’s aesthetically sumptuous works, fashioned by conjoining pieces of colored panel and a mounted found photograph, physically represent states of tension, transition, and imbalance. Not quite delivering painting’s solid image plane, nor springing from the wall as a sculptural object, these primary equations express, for the artist, “our collective condition - caught between one thing and the next.” Significant recent exhibition: Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art.
A.K. Burns
A.K. Burns ladles molten aluminum into sand molds of castoff button-down work shirts and t-shirts to produce a series of gestural mono-print reliefs. The results are silvery indexes of the blue-collar uniform worn by laborers and artists alike. The shirts mark an economic shift from the industrial labor of the body to immaterial and affective labor of advanced capitalism. Significant recent exhibition: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Recent Acquisitions.
Ulrike Müller
Vitreous enamel has historically been used across cultures as a decorative art, but also by industry for the production of signs and utilitarian objects. Müller adopts this firing technique to produce paintings that repurpose a range of modernist vocabularies. The surface of the works are highly polished, liquid and glassy. The works invite questions about the relationship between abstraction and context, the social meaning of forms, and the emancipatory potential of uncertainty. Significant recent and upcoming exhibitions: MoMA PS1 and MuMOK, Vienna.