Maria Bernheim Gallery proposes a duo presentation by American artists Mitchell Anderson (b.1985, Chicago, USA) and Sarah Slappey (b.1984, Colombia, USA) .
The idea of the pairing of these two artists has sprung from their intimate friendship dating back to their studies at Wake Forest University. Both of them having explored different aspects of art history both on a conceptual level and as heirs of American traditions ingrained in questions of identity.
Anderson has lived most of his adult life in Switzerland, having founded the artist-run space Plymouth Rock, and exhibited in museums and institutions throughout the country, he has become a pilar of its cultural life. Having moved here more Marfa, TX, his childhood had been spent moving around the country, he has accumulated a notion of pop culture as identity, trying to explore the motifs that make up our common grounds and values. In the two series he is planning to exhibit, Anderson will create a new large encaustic painting, resembling a mural, the ancient medium that uses heat, beeswax and natural resin, in layered hues of varying reds. Each painting depicts the design of a stained glass window with a hand holding a single rose, an image cribbed from the introduction to Walt Disney’s 1991 hallmark animated film, Beauty and the Beast. Anderson views this motif as a paradoxical image of generosity, capital and societal teamwork. Undeniably, the viewer is confronted with a rephrasing of Jasper Johns’ iconic “an image the mind already knows”, whose sexually charged targets Anderson’s works relate to in both image and medium. Continuing Anderson’s decade long involvement in the possibilities and limits of readymade sculpture, the presentation will also include works from a recent series of objects collected from the streets near his studio. All are situations left outside apartments with signs declaring themselves as free to take: “gratis” or “zum mitnehmen”. Similar to his series of street vending sculptures, purchased in touristic cities and exhibited over the past decade, Anderson searches for strong sculptural forms that reflect on wider social mores: here the dichotomy of littering and gifting in public space and how generosity is outwardly portrayed in society.
To parallel this research, Sarah Slappey will present new paintings, her works harness the organic structures of the human body in surreal compositions that consider the thin and porous borders between the sensual and the repulsive, echoing the very physical paintings of Anderson, yet composing with an entirely different aspect of art history and the history of painting. Slappey is part of a generation of female artistic practitioners who use humor and warping in an attempt to dismantle ideas of the traditional gaze on the female body in art and to rid painting of feminine shame. She repurposes the predominantly male dominated artistic movements and styles of the nude, surrealism and physical abstraction in an initial response to her own body. Her work engages the viewer in a gloomy, almost repugnant world, where every detail is perfectly rendered, thus expanding our impression of an alternate sphere. Slappey’s works occupy a non-traditional space within painting where the reduction of women in the arts can be critiqued, while the presentation and celebration of the sensuality of the human body can be celebrated.
Both of them come from very conservative backgrounds, places where identities cannot be built outside of the given mould, where queer questions are not addressed and where women bodies are always draped, and it is crucial to see how a slight change in perspective can open up possibilities.
