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LOS ANGELES — Together with her newest exhibition, We Don’t Owe You a Tomorrow, Judith Bernstein creates an increasing universe of ache and catastrophe. The artist continues to construct on the cosmology she started together with her Delivery of the Universe work, combining the Huge Bang with the social, political, environmental, and organic viruses that infect our lives. However the place works from the previous few years centered with laser-sharp fury on Trump and the historical past of political corruption and violence that aided his ascendance, her newest work are each much less express of their messaging and extra agitated of their power. Trump, and the neo-Nazism he emboldened, loom within the background however within the years since her final present at The Field disasters of planetary proportions have exploded right into a day by day cycle of doom.
The gallery’s giant entrance room establishes the present’s normal environment, whereas a small gallery incorporates her caustic early antiwar and feminist drawings and prints. Fluorescent black-light paint coheres into frenzied cyclones of gesture and type in a two-row, eight-painting grid on one wall. Bernstein’s recurring iconography reveals up — vicious vagina dentatas, personified phalluses — together with swastikas and textual content, together with the present’s title and the title “Trumpenschlong,” however they take a backseat to the compositions’ general chaos.
In “We Don’t Owe U A Tomorrow (Small #2)” (2022), a whirlwind of lurid coloration, overlaid with the present’s title in black block letters, edges a squid-like vagina dentata right into a nook. Rendered in thick, forceful brushstrokes and meandering traces, the types evoke monstrosity with out sharp definition, as if an unchecked drive is coming into being.
The present’s centerpieces are three work in a black-lit backroom. Reflecting the opposite works on a a lot bigger scale, they eat the small house. Unfastened, broad brushstrokes swirl into large nebulas to create a vertiginous abyss — the sense of movement in works just like the 78 by 78-inch “We Don’t Owe U A Tomorrow #3” (2022), whose sweeping strokes file the artist’s attain throughout the canvas, is disorienting.
The black grounds of many of the work intensify the sense of cosmic chaos, however they’re beset with a deathlike high quality not often seen within the artist’s earlier works, even ones that instantly addressed loss of life in conflict or genocide. Heads that resembled Mickey Mouse in earlier items mutate into cartoonish skulls that hang-out the canvas like loss of life masks from the previous or future, most prominently within the deliberately misspelled “Gasligting” and “Gasligting (Blue Floor)” (each 2021); and in “Gasligting (We Don’t Owe U A Tomorrow)” (2023), a pink face developed from her longstanding “Cockman” characters (heads composed of male genitalia) is frozen right into a shocked corpse.
It’s a darkish flip for an artist whose acerbic wit has usually accompanied her weighty topics, however possibly an acceptable one for the instances.
Judith Bernstein: We Don’t Owe You a Tomorrow continues at The Field (805 Traction Avenue, Arts District, Los Angeles) by means of August 12. The exhibition was curated by Paul McCarthy.
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