Ivana de Vivanco: still from ‘La Yegua de Santiago’, 2023
If President Trump makes the rich richer I guess that might be good for the art market, but the mood remains darkened by his victory: any Trump supporters there may be in the art world – I haven’t met one yet – are keeping quiet. After finding a couple of works reflecting that, I went looking for various sorts of consolation at Art Cologne…
Alexej von Jawlensky: ‘Meditations’ at Galerie Koch, (1934) and at Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel (1935)
Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941) painted some 300 schematic faces tending towards masks from 1918 onwards: the eyes are typically turned inwards, suggesting deep meditation or seeking a religious connection. As is usual, the fair featured several, including these late examples, dark enough to have a sense of deathly anticipation.
James White: ‘After the Party’, 2024 at Zander Galerie, Paris / Cologne
James White’s snapshot of the table after an evening with friends reminded him of the Warhol work from which it takes its title. Glasses often feature in White’s exacting translations of his source images into hyper-realistic, but black-and-white, paintings. Yet I don’t recall him painting as many as thirteen before. His poetry of the everyday tends to imply preceding human presence, here with the suggestion that matters are not what they were…
Steffen Lenk: ‘Untitled’, 2024, at Galerie Anke Schmidt, Cologne
The gallery’s many works by Steffen Lenk showed that he is a painter notable for the different ways in which he uses his material. Here he builds three-dimensional cartoon characters from an ice cream advert out of just oil paint and has them gyrate on top of the remnants of a disco ball. They come across as having to make an effort to be cheerful…
Muntean / Rosenblum: ‘Untitled (…Perhaps all anxiety might….’)’, 2024, at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
This floaty-floral lounge-about is typical of the duo’s deadpan blend of timeless influences with modern social contexts to leave attitudes evocatively ambiguous. And if all anxiety might indeed derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing, perhaps we can move beyond the electoral moment. Still, I suspect it won’t be so simple…
Susan Morris: ‘Binary Tapestry, Sunshine’, 2024, at Bartha Contemporary, London
Bartha Contemporary and Joost van den Bergh’s collaborative booth stands out for its combination of historic Tantric work with recent art. It includes Susan Morris’s two 2.5m-high Jacquard tapestries, only just made but based on her records of the amount of sunlight recorded by a digital tracking device she wore in 2010 and 2012. The black vertical threading demarcates hours in the day, and a curious shift is explained by her flying to New York. Perhaps we can take this self-portrait-as-a-light-meter to be a record of good times – the illumination that preceded Trump’s first term.
Tom Benson: ‘Each Season, a Palace (3)’, 2024, at Hidde van Seggelen, Hamburg.
Bright colour combinations are always cheering, and there were plenty at the fair. I liked this additionally for its poetry of titling and for how it is fixed to the wall: purely by the means of the nine diminutive steel pins that you can see in each of the hand-painted aluminium panels. I guess that makes it a nonyptich and, said the gallery, it was a nightmare to put up…
Thomas Hartmann: ‘Kino van Morgen’, 2021, at Galerie Georg Nothelfer, Berlin
Perhaps a little escapism is in order. Options included sex (cruising action, some staged, some real, with Lukas Städler at Dittrich & Schlechtriem) a massage (courtesy of Elmgreen & Dragset’s naked man awaiting service at Max Hetzler) or a trip to the ‘Cinema of Tomorrow’ in which Thomas Hartmann takes liberties with the hair (or are they colourful wigs?) of his audience-to-be, the better to mix up his painterly registers – as he often does – through a contrast with the geometry of the seating.
Nasan Tur: ‘The Invisibles – 1’, 2021, at Di?Ri?Mart, Istanbul
Was this a post-election posture, or just a visitor exhausted by art? In fact, the Turkish artist’s figure is based on the tassels attached to suits by way of military camouflage, which makes the wearer somewhat monstrous as well as less visible. Here, though, the deceit is undone not just by the location, but by the pinkness of one hand. ‘Even things that emerge as the result of power relations’, says the gallery rather grandly of such an abject figure, ‘bear the potential of moving away from those relations, of liberation, of becoming other things’.
Sylvie Fleury: ‘Composition No. III / Fox-Trot B, with Black, Red, Blue and Yellow’, 2023, at galerie lange + pult, Switzerland
The Swiss artist’s strategies for feminising would-be-heroic male traditions have been operating for decades, but this recent example is particular entertaining. Not only does she subvert Mondrian by the application of fur, as if his painting is a fashion item, she removes the colour yet retains it in the title. Moreover, we assume the faux fur is fox, hence the foxtrot, but might also be aware that Mondrian was a keen and accomplished dancer.
Ivana de Vivanco: ‘La Yegua de Santiago’, 2023, at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt (above and at top)
There isn’t much film in the fair, but the Lisbon-born, Berlin-based Chilean-Peruvian artist showed how it can grab passing attention without abjuring substance, In the spirit of Fleury, ‘St. James’s Mare’ presents – in a stable setting – scenes from an alternative history in which the national warrior saint of Spain white stallion turns into a pink mare and dismounts her rider. Not only does the mare cathartically ride the saint in the 12 minute film, she also enters psychoanalysis to heal her trauma – all handled with visual acuity and light wit.
