Lars Friedrich, Berlin
For their first participation at ART-O-RAMA, the Berlin gallery Lars Friedrich presents the work of Georgia Nettell, Clay and James Mathieu Malouf. The three artists have been active mostly in the medium of painting where they negotiate a terrain between figuration and serially produced imagery.
For Clay James, it would be a first serious art fair booth appearance. James’ work, if it has coincidentally been circulated under the sign of “painting” over the last few years, is in fact much deeper-reaching and legitimately operates within realms as diverse as philosophy, feminist theory, architecture, Lacanian analysis, kabuki theater and even new wave, a vibrant experimental New York city and Connecticut music scene.
By showing Nettell, Malouf and James together, the gallery hope to represent three different currents in contemporary image and object-making, the newest and perhaps most exciting being Clay James’deceptively repetitive, discretely beguiling matrixes of industrial screw coils that distill feminist critique, critical perspectives on one’s privilege, Lacanian architecture critique and Cage-ian repetition in a dense package.
Always interrupting themselves and their underlying circulation in lettriste-like stutters, James’ series of screw-images are like jump cuts lacerating the Spectacle’s smooth, liquid-like transitions.