Infected Foot
January 17th – February 25th, 2017
Ground Floor
Monika Baer Mathieu Malouf
Thomas Bayrle Laura Owens
Tony Conrad Paul Sharits
Michaela Eichwald Reena Spaulings
Jana Euler Josef Strau
Genoveva Filipovic Stefan Tcherepnin
Andrea Fourchy / Sergej Jensen Amelie von Wulffen
Michael Krebber
Greene Naftali is pleased to announce Infected Foot, a cross-generational group show of artists who disrupt the formal and conceptual parameters of painting. Taking its title from Paul Sharits’s 1982 mixed media work, Foot Infection III—in which the obsessive rendering of a foot infection radially consumes and ultimately exceeds its rectangular borders—the exhibition focuses on artists for whom disruption breeds dissemination. Stemming from a common social network—many affiliated with Frankfurt’s Städelschule—the artists in Infected Foot assume an antagonistic posture to address specific art world operations and legacies. The works on view represent various strategies of negation, revision, and at times perversion. Certain canvases show the expressionist hallmark of gesture evacuated by way of mechanical simulation or trenchant ventriloquism. Others contain limited marks incongruous with the monumental scale to which they are applied. Authorship is blurred or relinquished entirely; figures are excavated from art history to reappear in contemporary drag; and portraiture is directed away from the pathos of the human face and onto the absurdity of an animal visage.