The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Julia Wachtel and Anicka Yi: Death at Transformer Station Emerging in the 1980s, Julia Wachtel became known for her paintings employing cartoon characters appropriated from sources as everyday and relatable as greeting cards and magazines, deliberately commenting upon our quickly evolving visual culture. Often comprised of multiple panels, her paintings also include pop stars, figurines from so-called primitive cultures, and scenes from Hollywood films. In her work Wachtel consistently displays a consciousness of the dominance of images, their penetration into all areas of life, and the haziness of their interconnections and juxtapositions. This consciousness makes her work more relevant than ever. Influenced by her Pictures Generation counterparts, the protagonists of Pop Art, and Surrealism, she has developed a consistently individual visual language that grapples with the function and significance of images in modern society. The first institutional solo exhibition in almost 20 years of Wachtel’s playfully disarming yet trenchant artworks, Julia Wachtel spans the artist’s entire career and also features many recent works. Anicka Yi creates art that poetically speaks to the experience of everyday life in the 21st century and the things that govern it—whether major corporations like Monsanto or emotions such as those tied to loss. While her art often takes the form of sculpture, it hardly behaves as such, decomposing before our very eyes or wafting away in the form of a handmade perfume. Running throughout Yi’s work is a deep interest in all of the senses a human body can experience, not solely the visual—and thus one can often smell a work by Yi before seeing it in the gallery. Engaging with viewers on an intellectual, emotional, and even sensual level, her work is simultaneously alluring and curious. e-flux/announcements/anicka-yi-and-julia-wachtel-at-transformer-station/
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:00:02 +0000