“Nothing consoles us. There is no trace of any contact with a universal sense of order, no trace of a law that gives us something to rely on or leads us to believe that destiny, even in its most horrifying aspect, is, nevertheless, God’s will.”
This quote, from artwork historian Theodor Hetzer’s essay “Francisco Goya and the Crisis in Art around 1800” (revealed 1973) describes Goya’s print portfolio The Disasters of Struggle (1810–20), studying his references to battle as a service for his pacificist message. Extra subtly however equally considerably is that this correlation between chaos and godlessness. In artwork duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s present exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Just for the Depraved, nonetheless, those that management legislation and order are probably the most “godless” of all. The present is a grand drama of depravity and degradation, typically enacted by official powers like Church and State, different instances by rogue gamers exploiting their powers of intimidation. In all instances, although, there is no such thing as a comfort.
Throughout the gallery’s two flooring, the artists pair multimedia sculptures of flowering branches, rock, and boulders with a sequence of quick claymation movies by Djurberg, scored by Berg. The phrase “dreamlike” comes up regularly in discussions of the artists, and on an aesthetic degree, their work appears straight out of a fairytale. Within the gallery’s lobby, three gold beavers encompass a pile of Klein-blue branches under a blue bough sprouting flowers. Like a fairytale, the unexplained scene means that one thing sinister lurks beneath the innocuous floor. That wickedness emerges in full drive within the subsequent room, the place seven quick claymation movies are projected in a row alongside the partitions.
Set up within the gallery’s lobby in Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s Just for the Depraved at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
The artists mine traditions of the grotesque for the characters in these movies: A friar and a king share area with anthropomorphized animals whose totally human cruelty raises the query of why “humanization” connotes something constructive. Though the narrative unfolds roughly from left to proper throughout the room, it doesn’t actually matter the place you enter it. The characters commerce locations falling sufferer to greed, promoting out each other, meting out and receiving abject punishment, and coming again for extra soulless acquire. Collectively, the looped movies compose a story of corruption, betrayal, and ache during which protagonists and antagonists are one and the identical and no heroes survive.
The extent of workmanship within the work is staggering. Djurberg’s colourful carnivalesque characters are completely synched with Berg’s scores to create works which can be each beautiful and engrossing, even because the characters change into more and more barbaric. Their lascivious appetites evoke the bodily grotesque of the Renaissance that Mikhail Bahktin examined in his seminal examine Rabelais and His World (1965), however the pleasure related to what he known as the “lower bodily stratum” (versus the summary sphere of the thoughts/spirit) is right here changed with a cynical view of energy that finds its nourishment in nihilism.
Nonetheless from one of many seven movies within the sequence Just for the Depraved (2023)
On the second flooring are extra bucolic sculptures, adopted by an immersive set up of boulders and rocks sprouting flora. Entering into the room seems like getting into the foreboding realm of a Brothers Grimm story, however three looped movies (“Dark Side of the Moon,” 2017, “A Pancake Moon,” 2022, and “Howling at the Moon,” 2022) tread even additional than the Grimms into the darkish reaches of the actual and psychical forest as three female-coded characters — a pale moon, a younger girl, and a girlish pig — are coerced and abused by menacing male-coded animals.
Element of a sculpture in Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s Just for the Depraved at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg: Just for the Depraved continues at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (521 West twenty first Road, Chelsea, Manhattan) by February 21. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
