MAGIC + COOL
November 18, 2023 – February 25, 2024
Museum Penzberg
The exhibition MAGIC + COOL presents a selection of artworks from 1969 to 2012, the majority produced in the early 2000s. Bringing together close to a hundred works from more than 25 internationally renowned artists – such as Philip Guston, Jonathan Meese, Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter, and Sylvie Fleury – the exhibition looks at the role of humor, popular culture, and how the post-medium condition was relevant to art made in the early 2000s, a period defined by the Information Age, the modern internet, and an increasingly globalized world.
The exhibition is divided into three narratives. The first is the rupture with abstract expressionism and the return of the figure, as seen in Philip Guston, and the legacy of this departure among his contemporaries. The second looks at how the practices of Dada that developed in the aftermath of WWI came to be employed by contemporary artists in a post-9/11 context. The third explores the role of humor and the postulation of the cool – a stance of alignment away from the center.
Neo-Expressionism, Coolness and Magic
In 1969, Philip Guston was considered a first-tier abstract expressionist. His departure from abstraction to include representational figures in his paintings in the 1970s became known as neo-expressionism. The paintings were rendered in a willfully slapdash and cartoonish manner, a style antithetical to the refined and sensitive abstraction Guston had been producing for the past two decades. The hooded figure can be read as a Ku Klux Klan figure and was a commentary on the persisting racism in America. Guston's radical pictorial shift – his insistence on figuration at the height of formalist orthodoxy – constituted one of the most consequential ruptures in postwar American painting, profoundly influencing artists like Albert Oehlen, Günther Förg, André Butzer, and Jonathan Meese.
Tal R, Daniel Richter, and André Butzer, three artists who have defined a generation of European painters, all pay homage to the European traditions of expressionism in a contemporary context. Daniel Richter and André Butzer are connected through their association with the art movement known as the "Neue Wilden" or "New Fauves" in Germany. Though each artist has developed a distinctive style, they share common roots in the influential painting scene that emerged in Germany in the late 20th century, characterized by a return to expressive, figurative painting and a rejection of conceptual art trends. Their work can be situated within a broader recuperation of gestural and figural modes of painting that sought to reclaim subjective experience and emotional immediacy as legitimate sites of artistic inquiry.
Dadaism and Punk in Post-9/11
Dadaism was born out of the horrors and folly of WWI in New York, Zurich, and Paris; it was a rejection of all that was logic, reason, and the aesthetics of modern capitalist society – instead celebrating nonsense, irrationality, and chance. It could be argued that the Dadaists were the founders of collage and the readymade. Performers as much as they were creators, Dadaism was the first artistic movement to divorce itself from the need to create an original image. Both post-9/11 New York and a world gripped by WWI shared an air of social disillusionment and an omnipresent sense of global upheaval. The exhibition positions the Dadaist legacy not as historical citation but as a live methodology, reactivated by a generation of artists confronting the disintegration of narrative certainty in the wake of September 11. Three pillars of Dadaism that can be seen in the work of Dash Snow, Aaron Curry, Steven Shearer, and Anne Collier are collage, objections to authority, and a fascination with the supernatural.
Dash Snow's collages seem broad at first but ultimately point satirically at authority and good old American values, not dissimilar to some Dadaist collages. Through the collages, we can see Snow's rejection of structure, artifice, and cultural hegemony. Snow subjects all his materials to a scrupulous aging process that takes the works to the limits of their substance, underlining the object's finiteness; his fragments from ancient sculptures and current sources collapse temporal distance, rendering the distinction between historical and contemporary image production deliberately unstable. The Dadaists celebrated the abjection of authority and leniency towards chaos, and this can be seen as the foundation of punk. The punk scene is directly referenced in the work of Mike Kelley, Steven Shearer in his drawing of Quorthon, and Robert Hawkins.
Anne Collier's Crying Woman (Comic #16) takes comics from the 1950s to 1980s that were marketed toward adolescent girls, cropping and playing with scale in a manner that allows the female figure to subvert the male gaze. Through strategies of reframing and scalar disruption, Collier interrogates the clichéd narrative of the eternally suffering female subject – hysterical, passive, and of limited agency – exposing the gendered structures of looking embedded within popular visual culture. The work knowingly refers to Roy Lichtenstein's iconographic comic paintings from the 1960s, yet where Lichtenstein aestheticized the source material, Collier returns criticality to the image by foregrounding its conditions of reception and consumption.
Occult Practices and Disney Cartoons
The artists Mike Kelley, Andy Hope 1930, and Tal R reference occult practices and esoteric knowledge systems alongside pop culture references to Disney and Marvel comics. Both occult practices and popular comics entertain and revolve around magic but differ in their acceptance. The section examines how these artists collapse the distinction between sanctioned and transgressive belief systems, treating the iconography of mass entertainment and esoteric ritual as equally operative sites of cultural meaning-making.
Mike Kelley's "Satan's Nostrils" takes up the color and style of a Gucci scarf and emotive skull, and the title references a satanic celebration. His artwork was profoundly influenced by punk music, drawing inspiration from its rebellious ethos and anti-establishment spirit. Kelley's persistent trafficking between the abject and the decorative, the subcultural and the commercial, stages a deliberate refusal of the hierarchies that govern taste and cultural legitimacy. Andy Hope 1930's "Composition Alogique" from 2013, an ink drawing on cardboard, looks at three belief systems in America that seem to exist both in harmony and in almost illogical opposition: Christianity represented in the cross, astrology represented in a drawing of Saturn and stars, and belief in an "American" freedom or the Wild West, indicated in the figure sporting a cowboy hat and wearing nothing but underwear.
The drawings by Tal R, Sisters of Roll (B 20), from 2002, depict three women in a forest – a reference to witches, referencing the occult knowledge practices of women that raised suspicion in society. The contemporary understanding of witches is playful, but its history references the witch trials, the largest femicide in Europe occurring between the 16th and 17th centuries, which drew suspicion upon the powers of women and demonized the idea of women gathering together in the forest. Tal R's deceptively naïve rendering belies a sustained engagement with the suppression of feminine epistemologies, locating in folklore a counter-history to dominant patriarchal narratives.
Ghosts and Spirits: In the Eastern European Diaspora
Gert and Uwe Tobias are twin brothers from Romania who have developed a collaborative practice since the end of their studies in 2002. The Tobias brothers combine myths and legends from their Romanian heritage and Eastern Europe with motifs from popular culture, abstract expressionism, and contemporary graphic design. In a region that saw multiple regime changes in the 20th century, the oral and written folklore tradition has become a means of preserving culture. Traditions of the preternatural in the region, the haunted landscape, and mythic tales embody larger modes of cultural identity production. Their practice mobilizes the spectral as both a formal and political category – the ghost functioning simultaneously as a figure of unresolved historical trauma and as a vehicle for the persistence of cultural memory under conditions of erasure.
The typewriter, a near-obsolete technology employed by the artists, reminds us of the 19th-century awakening and the marriage of man and machine. The ghoulish and comical figures made using the typeface combine Eastern European legends with 19th-century technology as a commentary on the ominous melding of man and technology. In the Tobias brothers' hands, the anachronism of the typewriter becomes a productive estrangement: a medium whose mechanical limitations generate a visual syntax at once folkloric and uncanny, resisting the seamlessness of digital image production.