ART CITIES:Beverly Hills-Adam McEwen
Adam McEwen’s work resides somewhere between the celebratory and funereal. After writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph in London, he began producing obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton and Jeff Koons, highlighting the blurred line between history and fiction. In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Gagosian Gallery Archive
As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, Adam McEwen has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present. As McEwen’s solo exhibition title, “Nighthorses”, suggests, anxiety resides even in the most common images and objects. His art draws attention to the vestigial dramas of daily life; the forgotten is memorialized, the subliminal laid bare. Narrative flow is tempting to seek yet impossible to find. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a series of narrow, perfectly rectangular frames mounted on the wall. Rendered individually in graphite, brass, steel, and phosphorescent resin, they recall the serial geometries of Minimalism, only that the latchkey positioned inside the base of each frame suggests the back end of a truck, pared down to a schema. In another series, images of rumpled beds are printed onto sheets of vividly colored cellulose sponge and thus transformed into scaleless, undulating landscapes. Paired with life-size graphite objects fixed to the surface (an oar, a ladder, a hand dryer, and a lavatory cistern) they generate a sense of psychological dissonance. Through McEwen’s game of aesthetic surrogacy, ordinary things are charged with a sense of unspecified malaise. The unique physical characteristics of industrial graphite are unsettlingly nonnegotiable.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 26/4-9/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
