Michael Ned Holte on Kaari Upson’s “Portrait (Vain German),” 2020–21
“OH, I AM SUCH A PAINTER!” Kaari Upson as soon as exclaimed, although she typically went to nice lengths to disguise this vocation by sublimating her painterly impulses into hallucinatory sculptures, screwball installations, and audacious efficiency movies. “Portrait (Useless German)” is the provocative title she gave to a collection of modestly scaled work begun in 2020 and accomplished shortly earlier than her demise this previous August. Thirty-two of those hung in a double band round her Los Angeles studio once I visited it in January; ten will make their debut in “The Milk of Goals,” the fifty-ninth version of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Right here, work is a useful shorthand for advanced solid objects made with tinted Aqua-Resin. They started as tiny, tile-like accretions of thickly impastoed pigment on canvasboard that have been then scanned and enlarged. The sophisticated course of that produced them is much less necessary than their extremely charged presence, which teeters between ravishing and lurid.
The parenthetical title of the works alludes to their art-historical lineage. The basis of self-importance is the Latin vanus, which means “vacancy” or “futility.” Within the vanitas style, the entire iconography—skulls, melting candles, timepieces, flowers—symbolizes the passage of time and the inevitable victory of demise. Nonetheless lifes function technique of self-reflection—typically explicitly, as in Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Nonetheless Life with Self Portrait, 1628. In Upson’s variations, a face normally emerges from the fray. Generally it takes the type of a cranium; in a number of works within the collection, the face is a lumpy, Guston-y clock, ticking away.
The sophisticated course of that produced the works is much less necessary than their extremely charged presence, which teeters between ravishing and lurid.
Upson spent years driving a curler coaster of most cancers remedy and remission, working in extraordinary bursts of productiveness till her demise final summer time on the age of fifty-one. Protruding into the third dimension, these work are demise masks. Throbbing purples and dusty pinks (extra shades of Guston) seem often, recalling Upson’s abject solid mattresses and sectional sofas, which have been already stand-ins for our bodies, crumpled, sagging, bruised, rotting. The equation is pushed residence with explicit pressure in Upson’s set up Mom’s Legs, 2018–19 (first exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel, and later at Louisiana Museum of Trendy Artwork in Humlebæk, Denmark), during which monumental knobby-kneed limbs in corporeal shades dangle from the ceiling, variously resembling legs, logs, or carcasses.
The “German” of the parenthetical title undoubtedly refers to Upson’s mom, who emigrated from East Germany to San Bernardino, in California’s Inland Empire, and was typically a topic of the artist’s work, although viewers could must do some decoding to understand this. Upson’s first solo exhibition in Germany, at Berlin’s Sprüth Magers in 2016, was titled “MMDP”—“My Mother Drinks Pepsi”—and included a “logbook” containing excerpts of her mom’s chilling unpublished autobiography, detailing her upbringing underneath a brutal, repressive regime. Within the four-channel video Recluse Brown, 2015–16, the artist sports activities short-cropped blonde hair (a wig?), a red-white-and-blue checkered shirt, and denims—a mother persona that in later exhibitions would seem en masse as life-size sculptures however right here inhabits a Costco retailer as if it have been paradise, sitting on a provisional throne constructed of Pepsi circumstances. Within the artist’s personal phrases, “She interrupts house like an enormous lump.”
My preliminary response to “Useless German” transported me again to my first assembly with Upson in 2007, within the “honeymoon interval” of “The Larry Challenge” (2005–12), a sprawling investigation of a creepy San Bernardino playboy neighbor and his charred McMansion. In “Kiss,” a collection of work from 2007, she smooshed a portrait of Larry in opposition to her matching self-portrait, wet-on-wet, yielding a diptych that consecrated the psychic entanglement of artist and topic. The Useless Germans appear to do one thing related, though in methods which might be extra elusive than allusive, and accumulative—the red-and-blue grid of the Costco costume makes a suggestive return in considered one of these work, for instance. However largely I sense an artist confronting a traumatic inheritance that no quantity of portray might ever exorcise. That her mom’s demise preceded her personal by little greater than a 12 months makes it that rather more wrenching to ponder these painterly (self) portraits, which without delay verify Upson’s place within the vanitas custom and urgently carry that custom and its ever well timed obsession with finality into the current.
Michael Ned Holte is an impartial curator who teaches within the artwork program on the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
