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For this exhibition, Beaux Mendes—a descendant of an extended line of rabbis and Holocaust survivors—returned to their ancestral residence of Germany to be able to reckon with their inherited legacy. The LA-based artist painted within the Black Forest, the place the Nazi thinker Martin Heidegger stored his hut, in addition to within the Elbe Valley, which impressed Caspar David Friedrich, amongst different German Romantics. In an accompanying exhibition textual content, Mendes writes, “I’m returning to Frankfurt to color [my grandmother’s] home and I feel I can also paint myself.”
Whereas this exhibition options no self-portraits within the standard sense, Mendes’s small work, executed on nontraditional surfaces like picket panels and muslin, as an alternative do one thing uncanny within the Heideggerian sense, fusing metaphysical exploration with panorama excavation. This isn’t to say that the human physique is completely absent; its type could be, however its absent presence figures into these rigorous, usually dark-pastel examinations of place. Oma, 2022—titled after the affectionate time period for grandmother in German—affords a homely cabin within the forest, the sloping floor in entrance of it animated with a slush of yellowish white. Right here, as elsewhere, the skinny washes of paint elicit a way of dreamy, watery marvel.
In one other untitled portray from 2023, is {that a} close-up of twisted tree trunks, or is that the buttocks of 1 nude physique mounting one other from behind? These haunted landscapes come encrypted in a mist of secrecy, and it’s this thriller that sustains them, enabling them to linger on the partitions of our minds. Maybe you can go residence once more.
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