ART CITIES:Berlin-Merlin Carpenter

While Merlin Carpenter’s manner of working is sardonic and polemic, to leave it at this would be to oversimplify. What becomes clear from the artist’s oeuvre is that his enquiries and critiques are circular: they implicate all of the players in the art world – and this includes Carpenter himself. As the artist has written, “All cultural producers are critics, all are involved with marketing information and are thereby involved with the politics of knowledge. Information is the institution. If we (we are all critics) are the institution, then institutional critique is of ourselves and our role as value suppliers at the margin of a huge cultural industry”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Neu Archive

Merlin Carpenter presents 6 new paintings in “Business Women”, his solo exhibition at Galerie Neu in Berlin. In the works of the exhibition, the man in the mirror is contentiously looking out at us from the paintings and he even manages to escape the mirror. In the show’s last painting he appears on a mounting horse, victorious, potent. He leaves the petrification to the women who, though standing in front of the mirror looking in, become sheer ornament, whose reflections he occupies and who have lost their gaze to him. Carpenter’s Graham has successfully identified the commodification of feminine narcissist poses as his chance at transferring his petrified destiny. Also, mirrors have never been specifically kind to female bodies in art, particularly in painting. “Tallulah” and “Ashleigh” are outsized by the mirrors cutting through them, while in “Ashleigh”, “Victoria”, “Tallulah” and “Grace”, the focal point of the viewers perception is directed to the women’s asses, while their face shot is occupied by Graham. He has taken over their mirror while their object status is reinforced. Carpenter stages a “sphere of symbolic use”, namely that of women. But in contrast to Lawrence Alloway’s ‘70s identification of that sphere as the scenery of Photorealisms’ “Receptive Realism”, Carpenter’s attitude is neither receptive nor is it particularly realist. He instead pressurizes his source materials. What once was latent in the ads and editorial photographs of these women with Graham’s entering their painterly picture becomes literal: a symbolic sex that is naturalized no more.

Info: Galerie Neu, Linienstraße 119 abc, Berlin, Duration: 13/6-22/7/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.galerieneu.net