ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Kaari Upson

Kaari Upson worked in a wide array of media including sculpture, video, drawing and painting. For nearly two decades, she constructed a singular artistic universe that melded autobiographical and collective traumas, fears and fantasies and often illuminated what might be called “Americanness” or the “American psyche.” The Los Angeles-based artist’s artful conjuring of abject imagery targeted viewers’ psychological comfort zones, confronting them with visceral and affecting evocations of loss and instability.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

Titled “never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never” by the Kaari Upson, the exhibition premieres several new series that demonstrate an artist at the height of her creative powers. On view for the first time in the United States are two projects that debuted in the 58th and 59th Venice Biennales respectively: “Kris’s Dollhouse” (2017–19) and “Portrait (Vain German)” (2020–21). Each illustrate Upson’s deft combination of painterly and sculptural modes, as well as her complex method of casting and enlarging objects to produce uncanny effects and environments. Through various processes of recording, including 3D-scanning, mold-making, digital milling and painting, a dollhouse belonging to Upson’s friend, along with its contents, were enlarged multiple times to bring them to human scale. To these dollhouse fragments, Upson added some of her friend’s personal items, which were enlarged to become oversized. Scale is thus rendered strange and unpredictable, in a work that considers how we find self-definition in conversation with those close to us. “Portrait (Vain German)” panels, which feature ghostly, abstracted visages, begin from a similar principle: the artist first created a miniature painting, which was 3D-scanned, enlarged and cast using a silicone mold. Working with the mold on the floor, Upson painted one layer at a time, from front to back, making marks with pigment-tinted Aqua-Resin. As she built up the image, the marks she put down first were hidden by later ones, a process she dubbed “blind painting.” The final image is thus a combination of deliberate actions, chance effects and forgotten gestures, while the series as a whole relates to the theme of “vanitas” and its consequent notions of time, transience, death and beauty. In some panels the figure is clearly visible, while in others, traces of facial features are absorbed into Upson’s network of Technicolor.  The exhibition also presents a major new suite of paintings on canvas that Upson embarked upon during the early months of the pandemic. Alone in her studio, she returned to the medium of her early “Kiss Paintings”, reviving some of the same techniques. Using myriad painterly marks within each work, from spraying and masking to heavy impasto, the artist generated compositions in which symbols seen across her work take shape in paint.

Gingham patterning reappears in a group of arresting figurative sculptures that began as miniature wooden whittled dolls, another example of Upson’s play with scale, as well as her interest in materials, process and the complexity of familial ties. The sculptures’ uniform of jeans and plaid shirt is a combo often worn by the artist’s mother, and one in which Upson herself performed in videos taking on her mother’s guise. Yet the close-cropped hair and the cast vodka bottles that run along the sculpture’s spine, perhaps feeding the body or sucking it dry, reference her father. Their pinkish contents recall a mix of blood and water and emphasize the discomfiting bonds of family and the inescapable dilemmas of generational trauma. As a background to these later developments in Upson’s work are recent examples of her large-scale drawings. Created over many years, they display evocative fragments of text and image that offer a view into the artist’s kaleidoscopic thought process. Faces and bodies intermingle with images of her past sculptures, as well as lines of text that speak out from the page in a chorus of different voices, all incorporated at different scales and orientations to dizzying effect. Like much of Upson’s work, her drawings connote mixed feelings of repulsion and attraction, all the while luring the viewer into their experimental webs of information. Throughout the exhibition, Upson’s recurring characters, symbolism and gestures materialize through an array of aesthetic approaches and mediums, always returning to the inner workings of the self. Merging personhood and objecthood in ways both alluring and disturbing, the works demonstrate Upson’s unwavering urge to interpret the psyches and psychoses of our complicated twenty-first century lives, with vigor, depth and beauty.

Photo: Kaari Upson, Kris’s Dollhouse (detail), 2017-19, Site-specific installation, video, MDF, resin, urethane, pine wood, plywood, Aqua-Resin, pigment, spray paint and aluminum, Dimensions variable, © Kaari Upson, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery

Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 4/8-8/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, https://spruethmagers.com/