Kasper Sonne & Kadar Brock At The Hole Gallery
Kathy Grayson, owner of The Hole Gallery, has constantly blown me away this summer. First with her Xstraction show in June (which included my favorite Brooklyn artists of the moment, Trudy Benson) that started a whole new fun phraseology about Abstraction--Kathy made up factions of the genre; Substraction, Constraction, Craftstraction, Entropic Abstraction, and Relational Abstraction, haha, and one she might of not of made up, but I will, Digistraction. Then she turned the entire gallery into a massive reading room and art books for the whole month of August and now with her opening of season show, Kadar Brock and Kasper Sonne
From seeing Sonne's work on the gallery's website I was looking forward to the opening very much. However, the installation of his paintings was more than I was anticipating-- a room of about five monochrome burnt paintings bisected by a curtain of heavy chains. The chains, hung nearly floor to ceiling, have to be pushed through to see the other half of his show and his sculptural works--an action that causes some internal wrestling. I've felt this same do it/don't do it conflict last year at Jutta Koether's show at Bortolami Gallery. Koether created a "ground plane" installation to go along with her painting exhibition. The floor was covered with pebbles and walking over it, felt much like walking on Ai Wei Wei's sunflower seeds, fun but somehow irreverent.
The feeling of consideration of for the materiality and context that the works are displayed is something that Kathy has also pulled through into the main gallery of her space with the exhibition of Kadar Brock's work. His large multicolored, bleached, muted and distressed canvases hang in front of large black bean bag chairs that rest atop a carpeted gallery. Cheap, nasty, grey wall-to-wall carpet, its hilarious and somehow cozy at same time.
The show opened on the 4th and I still am thinking the show and the chains and the carpet and the beanbag chairs. Activating these amazing paintings in this cheeky yet fresh way has made me want these works all the more. I now feel if I owned a Kadar Brock, I'd also have to have a black beanbag chair, and if I owned a Kasper Sonne I'd have to also have a chain curtain install in the middle of the room. Is this Relational Aesthetics? I don't know, but I like it.