Urs Fischer's Rotten Foundation

While tongue-in-cheek art is a theme throughout his work— frequently utilising decaying fruits and vegetables as his own conceptual commentary— the result here is topical in a way that transcends mere sarcasm. While Trump-era art is not an uncommon sight in New York this year, Urs brings something unique to Karma, whether coincidental or not. And it absolutely goes beyond pairing a chair with raspberry jam. Seemingly sparse, with four pieces total, the resulting experience as an observer is overwhelming, a motif that mocks materialism. It is at once uncomfortable, useful, and strangely beautiful— as we can only expect from Urs.

Faules Fundament (Rotten Foundation), 1998/2017

Art

Rainbow in the Dark

Reyle's art critiques and draws inspiration from modernism, exploring remnants of consumer society, discarded materials, and symbols of urbanity and industrial change. His neon installations, which have not been shown in the U.S. for some years, create a rare and beautiful event that is reminiscent of a Moonbow.

The exhibition's title, Rainbow in the Dark, references Reyle's neon installation works, showcased in dark environments and made up of fragments or leftover neon tubes. The neon lights channel the flashy storefront decoration and gaudy culture of excess, exploring aspects of culture considered kitsch and using materials that some may regard as tawdry, prominently displaying them in high art settings.

In light of the exhibition, office connected with Anselm and Emann to learn more about this perfect collaboration.

How did you and Anselm Reyle meet? What about his work did you connect with?

Emann Odufu— Anselm and I have a mutual friend who is also in the art world. He was the intro to Anselm. I went to college with this mutual friend and while we were in college he had worked in Anselm's studio for a summer while we were at school together, about 13 years ago.

How would you describe your collaboration in curating the final selection for the exhibition?

EO— It's been a process, that has culminated for about almost a year and a half from our first phone call. It really first started when I wrote an essay in a catalogue for Anselm for a show he did at Dirimart in Turkey in 2022. The process of interviewing Anselm for that essay, coupled with a ton of research from his many other exhibitions was helpful in making the jump into the world of Anselm's work. From the essay, I feel like I understood what Anselm was about and the details of his artistic framework. Initially, we intended to do the show in a connecting warehouse to MoCA Westport to emulate 90's Berlin, we had a whole floor plan created, but we ended up not being able to shoot there for safety reasons and moved the show to the main gallery. That process required us to change the whole show and also pushed the show back a year. It was actually supposed to happen in April of 2022. As far as working with Anselm. It has been very significant. He has a very strong vision and understanding of his work, and honestly, it was really about going with the flow. Really helping and supporting Anselm in achieving his vision for the show and doing what I can to add to it. I'm a fairly new curator and I have this opportunity to work with a legend in the art arena, is amazing. Also, I feel like he genuinely valued my opinion, it never had a hierarchical feel to the collaboration. It felt like two creative people with support from teams of other people trying to make a dope show happen and make it a special moment. I think we are both pretty happy with how it turned out.

What do you hope comes across with the works on display?

EO— A feeling of happiness, or admiration, or inspiration. With this show you're sort of stepping into Anselm's universe and seeing the current manifestation of various elements that he has been experimenting with for decades. Experiments with color, materiality, surface, and light. There's no deeper meaning to it or maybe there is, but really what I'm interested in, and I think Anselm as well, is if you are reacting to it aesthetically in some way. I want the exhibition to tickle your senses in some way. I want you to go to the Neon Installation and take a pic and put it on the gram. I just want people to experience the show cuz its a good chance that if you do, you will enjoy it.

Watch Anselm and Emann in the midst of all the action.

How do the works on display trace your evolution as an artist?

Anselm Reyle— I am usually working on different kinds of work series at the same time. The Rainbow in the Dark exhibition shows a wide range of my artistic work. Two materials that I constantly use are silver foil and neon tubes. Both are materials that I discovered in the urban space when I moved to Berlin in the 1990s. To me, these materials tell a lot about our society. I feel drawn to them and I think a lot of people are fascinated by them, too. A large part of the works that I show at MoCA Westport incorporates these two materials.

Was the plan always to showcase the neon installations in the dark, or did that develop during the process?

AR—The show at MoCA Westport has been planned as an extensive museum show and the idea was to create an immersive installation in one of the spaces. The neon installation in the first room can be seen as a large, three-dimensional light drawing consisting of colorful neon fragments, which the viewer can step into. Naturally, for this kind of light installation, a presentation in the dark is most impressive. The idea to work with neon first came up when I discovered the broken neon sign above a shop window in Berlin. Even though it consisted of lines and letters it had a strong abstract quality, that struck me. That’s when I started buying leftover materials from neon-blowing manufacturers and started working with them. How did you land on the title "Rainbow in the Dark"? AR– Most of my works are Untitled. I am not a very linguistic person and that’s why it is not my favorite task to create titles. I source my titles similarly to the way that I incorporate found materials into my work. I am finding them for example in fantasy literature, B-movies, or Heavy Metal songs. It is funny because these titles often have something mystical, universal, or abysmal and therefore open up to a spiritual level, which is consciously not deriving from high culture. Rainbow in the Dark for example is the title of a song by heavy metal musician Ronny James Dio.

Were there any steps you took in particular to prepare the space for the exhibition?

AR— All rooms, except the entrance hall, have been darkened, the lighting of the spaces mostly derives from the works itself. But some spontaneous ideas came up during the installation of the show. There was for example this small space, in which a neon foil work was hung. We discovered a video projector here that was already preinstalled, which led to the idea to project a movie on the wall where the work was hanging. I decided to screen the black and white B-movie Them! (1954). The movie appeared like wallpaper, but at the same time, the images projected onto the wall and the work were changing constantly. We also took the last-minute decision to spray-paint the walls and ceiling of the entrance hall with fire extinguishers. This is a technique that I’ve found and appropriated from urban space, too, which can be comprehended as a mixture of vandalism and painting. It’s a lot of fun!

Art

Samuel Ross in White Cube London

Samuel Ross has had a multi-disciplinary approach since his time studying graphic design and illustration at De Montfort University, Leicester. His accolades—and there are a lot—are one thing, but he does more than receive prizes. His self-funded label A-COLD-WALL* was established in 2015 (and a womenswear line in 2018), but he began in fashion with 2wnt4 (a streetwear brand made in collaboration with Ace Harper), and this led to his discovery by the late Virgil Abloh in 2013. Ross also formed Concrete Objects (in 2017) with Joe Burns and SR_A (in 2019), which focused on furniture design and industrial design, and scattered some watch design within that. His brands have thrived, but his artistic vision has been the translator across his trades. A-COLD-WALL* was inspired by Ross’ upbringing (and the British class system) and comments on societal inequality. At the same time, SR_A (as his design studio) has architectural takes on furniture that signify something more significant than their material—they send messages through mediums.

On Tuesday, ‘LAND’ extended that message.

An industrial sentimentality hung from the walls and sat over the polished concrete floors of White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery. The message was open to interpretation, unconstricted, informative and discursive. Very Ross. Unlike the fast-paced and gruelling world of fashion, where the need to produce seasonal collections takes priority, these paintings were made over a year. Reminiscent of Richard Serra’s ‘let the work speak for itself’ mentality, the pieces were crafted over time—some of the larger works took up to 11 months—with industrial materials layered, scraped, swathed, and scratched.

Held in floating steel frames, the paintings reflect an emotive Samuel Ross, one held on a wall rather than worn with a tick or tucked into pants. These paintings are emotional. In contrasting blocked-out spaces (similar to Nicolas de Staël and his use of a composition as a perspectival device), Ross expands upon the ‘Black experience’ by exploring industrial materials and dislocated landscapes seen from above. Somewhat derived from old blueprints, their content echoes information, and the geographical references are implicit. Here, pigment is political. It communicates images: rust colours the mind into a picture of a factory, and a black-wreathed painting is as heavy as a welding desk. There is something to be seen behind the laborious work and meaty textures depicted.

OTHERS SEE IT (2022) is the darkest of the dozen. Painted over OSB board (made from compressed layers of wood strands), dollops of cracked, opaque emulsion and acrylic protrude alongside blackened aluminium tape and soaked card, their folds pressed like a pocketed origami. The refracting sheen of the acrylic and the light spray of metallic aerosol balanced the overwhelmingly dark painting that could easily dampen a room. Etched-over emulsions are mixed with masonry paint to form an intense craquelure rivalled only by the feeling of dry skin. They look ashy, and the paint appears to have dried like tar or igneous obsidian lava.

CLOSER TO DISSONANCE (2022) is a packed image. It absorbs a collection of mediums over soaked duck canvas. The colours of sand and honey mingle with speckled rust, parakeet green, and brushed eggshell and slate. A thin filament of light spreads across the boards like a Morandi backdrop with no bottles. The composition is less considered than, for instance, Robert Rymans’ To Gertrud Mellon (1958), which has a similar palette and a more restrained application of paint. The work hangs beside two other paintings. It appears sensitive, timid and unwilling to depart from its siblings. The expressive application of paint makes the works sit at ease in the apparent series, creating a wholeness that can only be felt when stepping back and observing all three works at once.

However, ANEW (2022) is heavily worked. It has implications of a topography seen from above. The honey-soaked card plays across the wood panels like glue on a draftsman’s table. The materials spread across bordered boards, displacing the panels in an allusion to broken geographical boundaries and overlapped space. The vincular cracked paint, and its similarities to shino-yu (allowing the surface glaze of ceramic to break), is potent, referential and intentional. Conservators have struggled with artworks by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock thanks to decomposing and cracking house paints. Ross places this industrial material in its barebones reality. As damaged. As imperfect.

The exhibition featured not only paintings but sculptures: three of them. Made from powder-coated steel and aluminium, their presence crowded the space in the middle of the room, separating the painted works into oblique sections. Rather than muting the experience, the sculptures sat humbly on the floor like cuts in the stencils of Alexander Calder’s dials. The larger steel and aluminium bodies were derived from sketches, while the smaller works, such as DISTANCE COLLAPSE IN HEARTLAND (2022), were forged from found materials. 7 HOURS (2022) had pressed pigments of Indian dye that diluted the canvas, sparking an immersive experience with the surface. However, the sculptures merely added to the sensory environment. They somewhat placate the intensity of the paintings, but not much more than the concrete block attached to the burning incense sticks and the ambient soundscape that can be heard in the room. Whereas the paintings shared frames like bread and wine, sculptures such as BODY WITH LAND (2022) added scale and shared the space, but at the cost of padding an already full room.

The paintings were self-conscious but content, and there will always be deliberation in the uneven crust of interpretation. Nonetheless, the images speak for themselves in a clothed way. Their compositional portrayal and the impasto cracks, bulges, and creased canvas all add to the feeling of a rising chest and breathing being. A being with a history and pain. The unspontaneous voulu in the sculptures is forgivable. The paintings are the purpose of the show. They are the heavy movers, the forms that assuage. They performed Ross’ expressive energy and gave a perspective with a whisper of emotion that, with breaths and a gaze, can make one think.

What about? Ross leaves that up to you. But one thing is for sure. The story of Samuel Ross is not over, and he’ll be back — in some way or another.

Art

Dancing With Death

The conceptual basis of the show spawns from Eagleton’s grappling with the inevitability of death, an idea that became all the more potent when Eagleton realized he was approaching the age at which his father passed 20 years ago. After learning of these origins, the work becomes all the more fascinating when chronicling the ways in which Eagleton both maintains these ideas and departs from such.

Though Eagleton’s motifs come from the works in his Grandfather’s collection, I find it particularly interesting to consider the his decision to eschew many aspects of these motifs, mainly the religious ideology that would be pervasive in these older works. Instead, Eagleton opts to render those same skeletal symbols as effectively futile, a decision which alienates them from any sort of religious ideology, or practically any ideology for that matter.

Instead, Eagleton asks us to grapple with the infinite uselessness of the human being in relation to its environments, an idea which is emphasized through the beautiful and unsettling landscapes that surround the subjects of the works. This emphasis on setting, maintained both through abstraction and an ethereal palette, effectively humbles the central characters that dance and contemplate in the works, making them seem almost secondary to the natural processes that exist with or without them.

Perhaps then there is an ideology within the work after all. I don’t want to fully commit to saying that the works resemble a nihilist picture, because I think that within Eagleton’s idea of human “futility” there exists a commitment to optimism: the half human - half skeletons continue to dance, in spite of, or maybe even because of the inevitable decay that surrounds them.

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