Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Abel Auer, "Untitled" (2009). Ink and acrlic on canvas, 53 x 42 in.

June 2009 Reviews

Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

Mira Schor

Sarah Crowner

Jefferson Pinder

Madelon Vriesendorp

Dan Graham

Joan Miro Hanna-Barbera Art Editions Jonathan Meese Francis Picabia From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips Healthy Results at Christie's Prints and Multiples Sale Navigating a Shrinking Art Market Back to Art

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When he first came on the scene in the early naughties, Abel Auer seemed mired in bubblegum mindscapes and folksy, stage-set forests. His work was Hansel and Gretel by way of Hanna-Barbera: a psychedelically kitsch answer to generations of heroic German art, but hardly barbed enough to puncture the armor of swaggering Teutons like Jonathan Meese. Fortunately, Auer has added a few new strings to his bow. In addition to exaggerated mountainscapes such as GR 10 (2008), on offer are paintings populated with Miróesque biomorphs and, in the glowering Mr Miller’s Animal (2009), Picabia-like overlays of trees and faces. Upping the level of quotation works in Auer’s favor, giving the work a more sophisticated flavor, while mixing things up allows painterly magic to occur in the friction between abstract and figurative elements rather than solely in the illustration of enchanted places.

In this show, hung — double-hung in places — so that drawings and paintings intermingle, Auer riffs on the idea of painting as portal; for instance, contrasting the psychologically charged celestial domain of Higher Being (2009) — in which a figure is ensnared by netlike grids — with the conceptually blunt The Third Door (2008), a door-shape painting decorated with a variety of colorful wood-grain effects, fitted with a real handle, and installed as if it might allow entry into an adjacent room. Unusually, the gallery windows are covered with blinds: Auer encourages mental flight, but clearly he wants to prevent distraction from the outside world.

"Abel Auer" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.