A large gold rectangle painted on a wall by a woman

Result #1

A large gold rectangle painted on a wall by a woman in a blouse and blue jeans is the largest work in the show. It fills almost ten feet of the wall with thousands of gold paint splattered on and smudged across. The work has a twilit-style color scheme and three wide and two narrow narrow margins of color painted on top. The splattered and smudged paint becomes a kind of rain forest of color—or rather of color that falls from the ceiling and drips down the wall. Another group of works consists of three wooden structures with several metal arms, a steel frame, and a metal coda made from steel and wood. They are each about four feet long and two and a half feet wide, and are upside down and suspended from the wall. One of them is connected to a single nail protruding at an angle and its bottom end points toward the floor, its second foot pointing upward. The whole construction is set on a very low plinth with some internal support below. The lengths are wooden and have a lot of curly wood in them. The wood is painted a dull red, and the colors—black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue—are all slightly frayed. The colors are not overpowering but are more like palette knives than as truly deep colors. The thing is so small and is not too big, but it doesnt work in a ton of different ways. The work doesnt seem to be designed as a piece, although its size and roughness may make it difficult to get started. The rectangular wood structure has been painted on its face, except for the top and bottom, where the paint is yellow and the yellow is the same color as the wood. The white paint is applied thinly and the wood frame is painted a blackish red. The canvas has been cut to fit, leaving a little space in the middle where the canvas was cut out, which is nice but leaves a lot of space behind.

Result #2

A large gold rectangle painted on a wall by a woman, a stack of plastic garbage bags, a small piece of fabric with the words shit is everywhere, and a two-thousand-dollar bill, drawn in black on white, seem to be wrapped in black tape. A street sign and two empty beer bottles allude to the untidy street. While Löfström never really stopped working, the art world never stopped. The Stuttgart retrospective opened in September 2000, and the painting retrospective opened in May 2003. But however significant the events in Stuttgart may be, Löfström has made the strongest impression by staying still and giving no signals. By painting his garbage, which he has always done in situ, the artist has left no place for the public to reflect or interpret. The viewer cannot assume that the artist will proceed with a straight face. One can only expect that the elements of the garbage will go down in one piece and the subsequent, individual garbage to be found next to a disused bathtub or next to a cheap TV set. The type of garbage is no longer a matter of individual things but of a shared trash that has been made a display. Löfström has shown this since the beginning of his career. He has always been somewhat sceptical of the social world, at least when it attempts to rescue trash by stealing it from street garbage. He has been campaigning against this world of trash for about thirty years. However, in that process he has never abandoned the anti-artistic project of creating a number of associations between trash and the figure of the artist. It is the garbage that Löfström and his friends threw in the garbage can, the garbage bags that they scattered around, the wooden remnants of their shoes, as well as the garbage bags on a car on a pile of carpet. Yet, in fact, Löfström has never forgotten the art world.

Result #3

in the street. This is a very literal painting, although one based on the simple idea of a square. But the format is like a Japanese kimono and the motif—a giant red blob—reads as a challenge to the viewer. On the other hand, the painting would be the perfect subject for a Japans version of graffiti art, a form of communication that is more general and global than the one Miko is referring to.The shows title, La Foute de lart (The art of the body), is a quotation from Les Demoiselles dAfrique (1863) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Paul Pelé. Here we find the themes presented here—man as beast, human as beast, etc.

Result #4

A large gold rectangle painted on a wall by a woman in her thirties has the effect of a kind of ramp, with a small bed in a hilly part of the landscape. As the viewer moves in and tries to locate the bed, she starts to get a little dizzy, and the area around it becomes less and less cultivated. In another work, Muralist (all works 1998), a man appears to be fishing with a piece of rope while some fish appear to be sticking out of his clothing, suggesting that he is about to be drowned. The picture is a surreal one, with the fish seeming to be a reflection of the pool. Of the paintings, I would say that its not much different from the paintings that precede it, and yet, as with the sculptures, it is a challenge, and perhaps a treat, to come to terms with the painting and sculpture that are what the show amounts to in the end.White objects—paintings, sculptures, photographs, postcards—seem to have been somewhat neglected by the artist, who has been called an object-artist. I would say that, in the case of the former, there is something grotesque in the way the objects are constructed and arranged; in the latter, they become strangely lyrical. It is as if there were a transition here from a more traditional sculptural form to a kind of collage. Here it is difficult to tell whether Würmberg is deliberately posing questions about the modernist mode of making (and seeing) a picture, or merely trying to move away from these questions. Its impossible to say. The work creates a sense of tension, a sensation of going from light to dark and back again, and back to light, and thus is also more lyrical than its constructivist predecessors.White has a knack for creating objects that are as ambiguous as they are mysterious, ambiguous, and menacing, and this is what shows up in her work.

Result #5

in a white overcoat, presumably the artist, frames a large gold rectangle with which she has inscribed, MONICA; LADY CAN START AT TWO: FINE; and STOP: DEAD; and SEXY.The artist appears to have a tendency to let her hand wander. In one piece, for example, the faint signature of the art critic, with his cartoon-like A and N, scrawled in bright pastel over a red field, the ghost of Richard Hamilton behind it, and the background red of a table. In another, there are five life-size pebbles, each inscribed with a letter of the title of one of five works by Gabriel Laderman. These work seem not so much a work of memory or memory traces as a blue-grey graffiti surface. The artist has offered us a portrait of herself, one of several works in the show, and one with a blank space at its center. What, if anything, does that gesture suggest about us, the viewer? In this we are all complicit.