Bodily Imaginaries at Koenig & Clinton

Artists: Albert Herter, Caitlin Keogh, Candice Lin

Exhibition title: Bodily Imaginaries

Venue: Koenig & Clinton, New York, US

Date: December 10, 2015 – January 16, 2016

Photography: Jeffrey Sturges, New York, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce Bodily Imaginaries, a group exhibition of works on paper by artists Albert Herter, Caitlin Keogh, and Candice Lin that presents divergent aesthetic approaches that reference discrete histories.

The provocative antiheroes of Candice Lin’s drawings confront colonial fears and fantasies head-on. Her pseudo historical etchings and watercolors, rendered in the style of a 19th-century imperialist travelogue, offer hyperbolically racialized caricatures who defy the safe bounds of control. Lin’s narrative revisits a complex portrait of the eroticism, the conquest, and the ritual that were often loathed in an Occidental self and projected onto ‘the other’.

Entirely constructed, mechanically hinged, and ghoulishly costumed, Albert Herter’s bodies resemble composite marionettes incapable of grasping their own strings. His intricately drafted, restless subjects are social creatures, whose forms are simultaneously familiar and foreign, artificial and expressive. In Herter’s Instauration and Aggressive Constellation series, individual and social trials, interconnected by chaos, are on full display.

In her drawings of anonymous female torsos, Caitlin Keogh employs visual dislocation, interruption, and isolation of bodies in visual space. Keogh’s subjects, decapitated and limbless, are imbued with ideal proportions, but clinically so. Dissociated bodies are often eviscerated, bound, punctured or penetrated by foreign objects, vegetal outgrowths, or decorative patterns. Keogh contaminates a Pop vocabulary of flatness, outline, and graphic precision with sensuality, undulation, exuberance, and the animate.

Bodily Imaginaries prioritizes repellant, disjointed, or incomplete figures that subvert established representations of official narratives, Vitruvian bodies, and sanctioned desires.

Albert Herter (b. 1980, San Francisco) holds a BFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he focused primarily on video, installation, and performance. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Partisan Gallery, San Francisco and San Francisco City Hall. He has also participated in group exhibitions at: Art in General, New York; Derek Eller, New York; Spiral Gallery, Los Angeles; and Arthouse, McAllen, TX. He will have his first solo exhibition in New York at Koenig & Clinton in 2017. In the Curtyard: Orchestrated Reduction of the Fantasm, recently published by Comfortable On a Tightrope and Museums Press, features the artist’s drawings and writings. His drawings have also been featured in The Third Rail, and Lacanian Ink. Herter lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982, Spenard, AK) holds an MFA from Bard College, NY, and a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include The Corps, Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2015) and Good Value, Fine Quality, MoMA PS1, New York (2012). She has participated in select group exhibitions at Algus Greenspon, NY; Melas Papadopoulos, Greece; Renwick Gallery, NY; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; and White Columns, New York. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, MA) received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University. Lin’s work has been exhibited at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; the Delfina Foundation, London; La Maison Populaire, Paris; and Alhóndiga Bilbao, Spain. Recent solo exhibitions include Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles and CAAA, Guimaraes, Portugal. She has been awarded several residencies and grants, including: the Artist Lab Residency at 18th Street (2015); the Fine Arts Work Center Residency (2012); the Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Borse Residency (2011); and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009); among others. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

Bodily Imaginaries, installation view, Koenig & Clinton, New York, 2015
Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York
Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, New York