Page 30 - Art Review

to loosely consider the death of Gianni Versace. each other. The works, we’re informed, ‘live off our reality. This may sound like what artists
Looking back on Keogh’s earlier work – in 2012, the contradictory energies of what is possible and do all the time; nevertheless, it’s gained urgency
he was making lumpy multicoloured sculptures what is imaginary’ – categories themselves that in an era of fake news, and the museum is being
intended as a kind of ‘species’ – what’s clear are unfixed; they pull us back to childhood, and programmatic about the subject, inviting
is a consistent commitment to art as processual: childhood into adulthood. Gronemeyer’s works, some 30 artists from 19 countries – the key
whatever the form, it’s in a constant, unstable murky at first but quick to get under the skin, issue being a global one – including a clutch
state of becoming and modulation from without. may be, as fellow painter Daniel Richter opined of Americans but also Claudia Martínez Garay
It may be that with reality fluxing so violently in one interview about her work, ‘not zeitgeisty’, (Peru), Anupam Roy (India), Zhenya Machneva
right now, metamorphosis is the new fixed. That’s but that doesn’t mean they don’t suit the times. (Russia) and Dalton Paula (Brazil).
3 the tenor one gets from Ellen Gronemeyer’s Unashamedly zeitgeisty and also in New During the 1960s, as an exponent of arte
new paintings at Anton Kern. The Berlin-based 4 York, meanwhile, is the fourth New Museum 5 povera’s lesser-known painting wing, Giorgio
German painter, who’s developed an out-of- Triennial, subtitled Songs for Sabotage. Nothing Griffa attenuated his medium to canvas, colour
time style that’s cartoonish and sour – at once to do with records by Black Sabbath or the and brushstroke, laying the latter out thinly in
mildewed in tone, grainy in texture and perco- Beastie Boys, the ‘sabotage’ here is rather glowing abstract battalions on exposed stretches
lating with detail, full of round-faced child- a mooted process (a ‘call for action’, as the insti- of cloth. The result, somewhere between serial-
adults and animals – here hangs up six new tution describes it) of engaging with media ism and expressive abstraction, is at once finished
canvases featuring adults, children and pets both new and traditional in order to illumi- – it’s on the wall – and not; something, again,
either contemplating or, indeed, merging into nate how they fabricate, rather than mirror, in process, unfolding in concert with one’s

3 Ellen Gronemeyer, frozen, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 32 × 24 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

4 Claudia Martínez Garay, The Leftovers, 2016, mixed media, 370 × 470 cm.
Photo: Arturo Kameya. Courtesy the artist and Ginsberg Galería, Lima

30 ArtReview