There was an Anselm Keifer solo show entitled EXODUS at Gagosian Gallery on Wilshire in Los Angeles. The expansive space was once a private museum owned by two sleezy union-busting pieces of trash but is now this commercial gallery.
As overwhelmed by the spectacle of fabrication as one might get, my attempts to write about this exhibit went nowhere. Other than screaming “Size Matters” it accomplished little else. As usual with Keifer, photos of the work reveal him to be a tracer of images that appear graphically to the camera but are glopped in gallons of painterly lube that look less rendered and more like art to the naked eye.
Frustrated I turned to artificial intelligence to write three reviews of a show that desperately wants to be deep but is more superficial than my bandwidth could carry.
- Big, like two-story big, paintings
- Reverential vibe
- Artificial Intelligence errs on the side of praise.
- Columbo’s presence here implies guilt.
- Keifer trafficks in guilt.
- The reviews all fixated on this piece out of a need to include that different mediums were present in the show. Maybe advice to artists of a way to get attention.
- Maybe not, though.
- Consider this, what if A.I. will teach the world to stereotype more efficiently than anyone’s racist old grampa?
- Look close and count the squares, that is a stack of giant canvasses.
- It’s just oil on canvas, it can’t hurt you or change your beliefs.
I will add that the structures holing these paintings up were interesting. That’s all.