Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong. Anything could be inside. - Alexandra Kleeman “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine”
HESSE FLATOW is proud to present Getting to Ick, a group exhibition featuring the work of twelve artists: Ever Baldwin, Corydon Cowansage, Alison Croney Moses, Lucy Kim, Julia Kunin, Molly Lowe, Leeza Meksin, Bridget Mullen, Estefania Puerta, Douglas Rieger, Victoria Roth, and Grace Sachi Troxell.
Focusing on the guttural and internal, this show probes at the experience of living in and having a physical body. Delving into pleasure, pain, and the banal, the works touch upon the idiosyncratic and yet universal experiences that accompany being a human. Wounds and scars are hidden from outward view. Natural occurrences such as stomach gurgles and phlegmy sneezes are apologized away to others and treated as if they were grotesque. The artists in this show use abstraction to unveil bodily parts and experiences; eyes, breasts, stomachs, and buttocks are transformed into permutations simultaneously monstrous and grand. In a world where health and fitness fixations compete with a post-pandemic awareness of the limitations of one’s body, these artists consider the mechanisms of the flesh.
Materiality is at the center of this exhibition. Alison Croney Moses uses wood to mimic peeling skin and the pressure of blood right under the surface in a visceral turn. Bulbous, amorphous clay orbs composed of an amalgam of casts from Grace Sachi Troxell’s family members and vegetation appear akin to calcified rock formations straight out of the Earth. Craggily outstretched arms, a spindly tail, and curious ear/eye hybrids punctuate Estefania Puerta’s wall work, a reference to the mythical plant-humanoid mandrake. Julia Kunin’s ceramic works cheekily highlight the swooping of breasts and buttocks of uneven size and shape. The surfaces of Leeza Meksin’s works explode into vibrant hieroglyphic-like patterns of bodily buildings. Ululating underbellies and oblong shapes are both weighty and sensual in Ever Baldwin’s constructions. At once titillating and repulsive, Douglas Rieger’s sculptures are imbued with erotic references shrouded by a strangeness.
Externalizing the internal, the works of the painters in the show dissolve into the language of abstraction. They insert limbs, hair, facial features, and flesh into their compositions, grounding an otherwise otherworldly out-of-body experience. Placed from a high vantage point, as if on an operating table, Bridget Mullen’s work feature prodding and poking hands that rip apart organs and pluck away hair in actions that are part-science experiment, part beautification ritual. Corydon Cowansage drapes locks of hair and lips across her canvases, their graphic quality wiping away specificity from any particular pair of lips. Lucy Kim’s work playfully juxtaposes direct impressions of objects and bodies with smooth painted imagery, clashing reality with the ideal. Victoria Roth’s paintings are sinewy and bold, suggesting references to a brain’s synapses or the regeneration of cells. With bright heaps of limbs, Molly Lowe’s forms unfold atop themselves, finding joy and anguish in the curling of a bicep, the unflexing of a leg.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to the essay by art historian and curator Linda Norden, “Getting to ‘Ick’” published in the exhibition catalog in conjunction with the exhibition Eva Hesse: A Retrospective at the Yale University Art Gallery. The works in this show blur the line between repulsion and attraction, perhaps getting to what Eva Hesse envisioned as a reprisal against self-hatred, an embrace of living in and being a human body, of knowing oneself, her “Ick,” the German “Ich” or “I”.
