Monique van Genderen by Miles McEnery Gallery

MONIQUE VAN GENDEREN

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

REACTION PAINTING By Jonathan Griffin

With some reluctance, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to begin this essay on the exuberant, unruly, and defiantly complicated paintings of Monique van Genderen by setting out a list of concepts that I find myself pondering when I look at her work. These concepts are often thought of as masculine, and they also could have been lifted from my high school physics textbook. Velocity and vectors. Volume, mass, density, and viscosity. Temperature and pressure. Power and energy. Depth. I feel some reluctance because van Genderen identifies her seemingly limitless vocabulary of marks, textures, colors, and forms as an emphatically feminist language. Terms of measurement and quantification are, on the face of it, very far from her ken. In her latest suite of untitled paintings, on exhibit at the Miles McEnery Gallery in November 2018, there are no straight lines, no right angles or grids, no flat areas of color. All is alive, unstable, and on the move. These paintings are organic both in form and in process: They are products of the human body, and they ultimately represent it. Nevertheless, van Genderenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work simultaneously evokes the terminology of empirical measurement and poses a challenge to it. The most obvious ways in which this challenge manifests are through certain deceptions that take place within these paintings: the impression of speed, when in fact the paintings come together slowly; the impression of ease, when in fact the impressions the paintings impart are hard won; the impression of spontaneity, when in fact the paint-

ings are carefully premeditated (and, elsewhere, the impression of premeditation when in fact they are blithely spontaneous). Sometimes, a sequence of overlaid marks is actually applied in the reverse order of how it appears on the canvas. A swooping brushstroke, on close inspection, is circumscribed by the sharp edge indicative of a taped-off mask. Was the background painted over it, then the tape peeled away, or did the artist use the mask to transpose the outline of an existing brushstroke from elsewhere, as Franz Kline famously would? Not all is as it seems. Van Genderen’s pictures might seem to be all fizzy, effervescent surface, but in fact they are structured around delicately veiled layers and barely perceptible underpainting. Because van Genderen’s finished paintings retain an air of transparency, of open4

ness, or even sometimes of incompleteness, they invite us to try to understand them by taking them apart, by reversing the processes of their construction. (I freely acknowledge that this is the reading of a heteronormative cis-male observer, for which, to paraphrase Sacha Baron Cohen, I apologize.) A line wraps around a solid form, so I perceive it as an embrace—even if that form might have been filled in later, growing to fill the line’s enclosure. An X appears to cancel what is beneath it, although it quickly becomes obvious that its background was painted subsequently, and in some places overlaps it. The directionality of drips and spatters points us back toward their sources. Juddering stripes consisting of repeating gestures (evidently made with an unevenly coated sponge roller) reveal their beginnings and endings as the roller’s paint is used up and the pattern fades. In one painting, a searing vertical streak in the center of the composition was clearly the result of a downward spilling pool of Prussian blue near the top edge of the canvas. The blue is outlined by a gray drip, however, that must have preceded it.

If only, I think, I could retrace these narratives of call and response—of action and reaction—back to their sources, I could find out how and why van Genderen arrived at her unlikely conclusions. That hope is in vain; her paintings resist such intellectual domination, filled as they are with misdirection, detours, and dead-ends. They are not culminations of any particular consistent method, but idiosyncratic explorations into an infinitely deep and unpredictable space carved by history, tradition, and technical and imaginative possibility. There is, however, a germ of validity to my attempt to discover the source of van Genderen’s actions and reactions. It finds an echo in her process of making paintings, and in her eventual relationship to them as their author and their primary critic. She has said that she usually starts with a problem and works to solve it, counter it, or balance it out. A large, blocky form, for instance, might be a certain kind of problem that engenders a range of solutions. The solutions in turn create their own aesthetic problems, and so on. Starting a painting with an X, as she does in a couple of instances here, is to begin with a negation, a final damning assessment that must be reversed, undone, made positive. If, ultimately, the painting achieves a certain equilibrium, that equilibrium is not to be confused with a neutral position. It seems to me that there are always some problems left unresolved, some threads untied. This is what gives van Genderen’s paintings their momentum, their propensity to change before our eyes even after the paint has dried. It is why the artist talks about them in terms of risk: not just the risks involved in their creation, but the risk of letting them out into the world when even she is still getting to know them.

Are we getting close here to ascribing autonomy to the individual paintings? That might be going too far—after all, there is little within them that is not closely manipulated by the artist—but it is fair to say that each one has its own dynamics, its own ecosystem, and its own rules, which van Genderen sets up and then arbitrates, like a referee with her own ideas of how the match should go. Her paintings typically consist of the meeting of major situations with minor situations: a vast round field of yellow, for instance, descends from the upper right of the canvas, seemingly compressing the layered effects beneath. An awkward black form—not a body, exactly, but maybe a body under a blanket, like Joseph Beuys in a room with coyotes—floats unmoored in the middle of the picture plane, while its base discharges a flurry of dry-brushing and gorgeous, gilded blue spots. These are power dynamics as well as compositional structures that play out according to their own logic. Within the rectangular plane of a canvas (in these new identically sized works, all 6

vertical), the most innocent marks incline toward representation. A horizontal line cannot help but conjure a horizon, thus casting all other gestures on the canvas as features in a landscape. A vertical form is easily interpreted as a human figure. Van Genderen accepts this tendency with good humor, then works to undo it. If her paintings are representative of anything external to themselves, it is to a typology of painterly marks that the artist carries around in her memory. This catalog, as she refers to it, is sourced from across the breath of global art history, and includes Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, just as it does the misty spatter fields of Hans Hartung, for example, or the soaking, luminous daubs of Helen Frankenthaler. By no means are all of her marks so specifically attributed, and many are influenced by a wide generic group of painterly precedents, but in all instances van Genderen is involved in a process of gestural appropriation. By co-opting existing marks—most, though by no means all, made by men—and

adapting them to articulate her own subjective position, she considers herself to be contributing to a feminist system of reclamation and subversion. I find it most useful to think of van Genderen’s paintings not just as feminist but more generally as queer—in the expanded aesthetic sense of that word. She combines the obviousness of surface effect with the sly disorientation of hidden layers, unexpected formal encounters and clashing chromatic interventions. Her paintings are imbalanced and discordant, off-kilter and off-key. Employing what she has described as “an obnoxious amount of color,” she orchestrates jangling color combinations that, while eccentric, somehow work. Her technical restlessness—which has led her to incorporate metallic, fluorescent, and even luminous pigments (the latter only discernible with the lights switched off), as well as an eclectic arsenal of tools with which to apply them—could all be thought of as an exploration of minor effects, an elevation of the marginal.

Van Genderen admits to being concerned with beauty, with the ambition to make a beautiful painting, although she concedes that she doesn’t necessarily believe in the existence of an ugly painting either. To me, her paintings are neither beautiful nor ugly, those inadequate terms being too tightly enmeshed with existing standards and hierarchies, even with ideas of morality and social value. Instead, her paintings are things vividly alive and, therefore, also affectingly vulnerable, things caught mid-flight, falling apart and falling back together. They are paintings that are going somewhere, somewhere strange and unknown, but that are also palpably aware of where they came from.

Jonathan Griffin is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for Frieze magazine and his writing also regularly appears in Art Review, Art Agenda, Apollo, The Financial Times and The Art Newspaper. His book On Fire was published in 2016 by Paper Monument.

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#29681)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#29682)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#29683)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30192)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30193)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30194)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30195)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30196)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30197)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30198)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30199)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30200)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30201)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30202)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30203)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30355)

Untitled, 2018 Oil on linen 78 x 58 inches 198.1 x 147.3 cm (MMG#30356)

MONIQUE VAN GENDEREN Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1965 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2011 Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA Kunstverein Heilbronn, Germany “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany

EDUCATION 1991 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 1987 BA, University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA

2009 “The Library: Start This Story Over,” Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2008 Effearte, Milan, Italy “Dirty Water,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany

2018 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Festsaal,” Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Germany

2007 The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA Voges + Partner, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, Austria

2017 Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA TAI Modern, Santa Fe, NM

2006 “The Sensory Foundations of Mental Life,” Savannah College of Art and Design Atlanta, GA Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium “Hammer Projects: Monique van Genderen,” Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece

2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY TAI Modern, Santa Fe, NM 2015 “Manufactured Paintings,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA 2014 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Abstrakt Maler,” Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, Norway TAI Modern, Santa Fe, NM 2013 Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA 2012 D’Amelio Gallery, New York, NY Effearte, Milan, Italy

2005 “Within the Same Breath …” (curated by Claudine Isé), Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA Howard House, Seattle, WA 2004 “Locker Plant,” Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA 2003 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 2002 “New Work,” Sandroni Rey Gallery, Venice, CA

2001 Venetia Kapernekas Gallery, New York, NY 2000 Sandroni Rey Gallery, Venice, CA 1999 Deep River Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1996 “Standard of Living,” Amanda M. Obering Gallery, Los Angeles, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 U.S. Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname “Being Here with You/Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “You Are Here,” San Diego Central Library, San Diego, CA 2017 “Rita and Herbert Batliner Collection,” Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria 2016 “Flashback and Guests,” Stalke Galleri, Kirke Saaby, Denmark 2015 “Jacques André, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Monique van Genderen, Ola Rindal, Josh Smith, Kelley Walker,” Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium “Lost in a Sea of Red,” The Pit LA, Glendale, CA “Be Abstract,” Galerie am Markt, Schwäbisch Hall, Germany “Be Abstract,” Ballhaus Ost, Berlin, Germany “Stray Edge,” Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, CA

2014 “Ladies First!,” Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany “Abstrakt Maler: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, Norway “Capture the Rapture,” CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Another Cats Show,” 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, CA “Stijn Ank, Monique van Genderen, Jeremy Sharma,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Volta Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland 2013 “High Low,” Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA “Garden Party,” Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA “Painting in Place,” Los Angeles Nomadic Division at Farmers & Merchants Bank, Los Angeles, CA “Anders Kjellesvik/Monique van Genderen/J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany 2012 “Burning Colours,” Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels, Belgium “The Venice Beach Biennial,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA “The Planter Show,” ForYourArt, Los Angeles, CA “Paper Does Not Blush,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany 2011 “Dorothea,” Ancient & Modern, London, United Kingdom “Works of Paper,” ACME Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art,” ACME Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2010 “Ambigu-Zeitgenössische Malerie zwischen Abstraktion und Narration,” Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, Norway “Hoehenkoller,” Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA “Abstractive Measures,” Arena Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2008 “Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art,” Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA “Punto Linea Superficie (Dot Line Surface),” Effearte, Milan, Italy 2007 “Back to Nature,” Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, Austria Twentieth Century Fox Studios (organized by The UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art), Los Angeles, CA “Fleeing the Scene,” The Happy Lion Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Small but Beautiful,” Gasser & Grunert Inc., New York, NY “Sparkle Then Fade,” Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA “Modern Lovers,” Glendale Community College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA “Group Show,” Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece

2006 “Art Unlimited” (curated by Samuel Keller), Art Basel 37, Basel, Switzerland “III Edicio del Certamen Internacional de Pinture de Castello, Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón,” Castello de la Plana, Spain “Masters & Johnson,” Charro Negro Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico “Off the Shelf: New Forms in Contemporary Artists’ Books,” The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY “Los Angeles Art Now,” Galeri SE, Bergen, Norway “Rundumschlag,” Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, Austria “Hotel California,” Glendale Community College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA “Strictly Painting,” presented by Galerie Michael Janssen, Dogenjaus Galerie, Voges + Partner Galerie, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, David Hunt, KLFProject Space, New York, NY

2005 “Wall Paintings” (curated by Frances Colpitt), University of San Antonio, TX “Strictly Painting III, The Right Side of Painting,” Voges + Partner Galerie, Frankfurt am Main, Germany “Sight Lines,” Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne, Germany “The 48th Corcoran Biennial: Closer to Home,” Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. “Monique van Genderen and Kirsten Everberg,” Le Consortium, Dijon, France 2004 “Full House” (curated by David Pagel), East Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA “The Sixth Annual Altoids Curiously Strong Collection,” New Museum, New York, NY Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA “So Few Opportunities, So Many Mistakes” (curated by Josh Smith), Champion Fine Art, New York, NY “Wake Up and Apologize,” Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2003 “Small Works,” Margo Victor Presents, Hollywood, CA “The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were,” Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “The Art of Paint,” Gallery C, Hermosa Beach, CA “Fragments,” PS Project Space, Amsterdam, Netherlands 2002 “Art on Paper,” Weatherspoon Museum of Art, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC RAID Projects, Los Angeles, CA “Fake Paintings,” Kbond, Los Angeles, CA

2001 “Lineformcolor,” Howard House, Seattle, WA “Big Plastic,” Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA “Cross-Cuts: Seven Los Angeles Artists,” Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles,” The UCLA/ Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL “De Beaufort, Exposito, van Genderen,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Painting beyond Painting,” Christine Rose Gallery, New York, NY 1997 “Trimmings and Scraps,” Gavlak Projects, Silverlake, CA “Trans Inter Post: Hybrid Spaces” (curated by Pamela Bailey), University of California, Irvine, CA “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (collaboration with John Souza, curated by Sue Spaid), SITE, Los Angeles, CA

2006 The Castellón County Council III International Painting Prize, Castellón, Spain (shortlisted) 2004 Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence, Marfa, TX COLLECTIONS AIG SunAmerica Inc., Los Angeles, CA Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, Peoria, IL Eileen Harris and Peter Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA KB Home, Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA

1996 “Available Space,” Gallery A, Santa Monica, CA “Trans Inter Post: Hybrid Spaces” (curated by Pamela Bailey), University of California, Irvine, CA “Love Labors Lost” (curated by Sue Spaid, collaboration with John Souza), Site Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1993 “Private and Public Pleasures” (curated by Lauren Lesko), School of Beauty, Los Angeles, CA

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C. Rita and Herbert Batliner Collection on permanent loan to the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Le Consortium, Dijon, France IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern), Valencia, Spain

SELECTED AWARDS 2018 Federal Courthouse Building Art Commission for the GSA, Arts and Architecture Program, Harrisburg, PA 2017 West Hollywood 1% for the Arts Public Art Commission, West Hollywood, CA

Montblanc Cutting Edge Art Collection, Hamburg, Germany.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

MONIQUE VAN GENDEREN 15 November – 22 December 2018

Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2018 Jonathan Griffin 48 Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Philipp Scholz Rittermann, Escondido, CA Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-03-8 Cover: Untitled, (detail), 2018 (MMG#30198)

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY