Body and Blood: Mitchell Anderson

This exhibition sequences continuations in readymade, encaustic and embroidery.

 

The main concerns are patterning, coding and cannibalism.

 

The visual patterns have been employed by some hegemonic artists. I  reappropriate what they previously claimed.

 

The reclamation of the original is more vital than any reference to earlier use in contemporary art. Easter eggs rather than homage.

 

The initial thinking was informed by Warhol’s Retrospectives and Reversals of 1979, his appropriating himself appropriating others in long cinematic panels.

 

A series of Flowers I began in 2021, reappropriating previously appropriated imagery of the floral, is a precursor.

 

Encaustic panels buttress each work. The material captures every moment of my interaction with it. Bodily and atmospheric.

 

Two types of hand embroidery are present: I abstract text through the process of transcribing and solid fields of embedded labor are completed alongside a team. Here the texts derive from jokes Richard Prince appropriated, specifically those suggesting an uncomfortableness with same sex interactions.

 

My interest is in the entwining of content with inert material.

 

The formats and proportions for each polyptych have been taken from those of Joan Mitchell.

                 

My given name contains that of Michel Majerus, plus one “T” and an extra “L”.

 

The boxes are branded, single-use, everlasting life. Expired now, their virgin contents are embalmed as art.

 

Funeral homes use specific stands to display flowers honoring the dead, these stands are those.

 

The spectrum of red expands, but my reasons for lingering in the palette remain. It is a tone of infinite contradictory meanings placed upon it across cultures. Love, hate, revolution, luck… Blood signifying life and blood signifying death. Judd thought it was the color which showed form best.

 

This is some of what I do.

 

Mitchell Anderson was born in 1985 in Chicago and lives and works in Zurich. Anderson received a BFA from Wake Forest University and an MFA from Institut Kunst, Basel. He recently had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle 8000, Wädenswil. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva; Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunsthalle Zürich and elsewhere.

 

Body and Blood will be on view at Rämistrasse 31 in Zürich from June 9 - July 28, 2023, Wednesday to Saturday 12PM - 5PM. For additional information, please contact the gallery at +41 (0)79 700 7928 or info@mariabernheim.com.