On View
Alexander Berggruen
May 15–June 26, 2024
New York
Once in a while you can get shown the light. Anna Kunz’s Paintings to the Full Flower Moon, on view at Alexander Berggruen through June 26th, offers up eleven new acrylics-on-canvas that dance playfully along the lines between the earthly and celestial while retaining the craft-forward frankness of 2021’s With Rays. Kunz’s sun-drenched psychic geometries are winners on their own, with a leaning towards the spiritual that serves to bolster, not diffuse, their immense craftsmanship. Within the context of a city whose art world wrestles with the Dark Side and a worldwide “vibe-shift” permeating across media, this array of celestial openings in the Upper East Side feels practically miraculous.
Each of the paintings in Flower Moon (all works 2024) begins with a process Kunz calls “fabric transference,” wherein an overarching composition is laid on each canvas by pressing paint through a thin layer of material. This lends each canvas an origin point—note the wide event horizons of color snaking around Perennial and Cherry Curve, and you’ll soon see them poking out of the corners of Into Shadow and Full Sun Light Shade, a piece-by-piece viewing process not unlike the making of the work. Shocks of bright color are emergent and reinforced by the intentional and unintentional consequences of a physically involved form. As one settles in with Flower Moon, and the temporal costs of this form begin to make themselves bare, the works take on a feeling of prior-existence as you steep in their afterglow. It feels as though they’ve been hanging here and will continue to hang here forever. You start to draw your own patterns from the recognizable shapes into pools of darkness, eyes darting along craggily lines that straighten from afar. The fantasy realm Kunz hints toward in each title becomes enticingly real.
Kunz’s temporal sorcery is aided by her confidence with a large canvas. The smallest paintings, including the major/minor diptych Solar J & Lunar J, are sixty inches on their lateral side, while the largest, Bells, stands around six foot five. Bells is a good example of how Kunz’s deployment of scale is akin to a practical magic: there’s enough room for the artist to collide what seems like the entire blue-violet spectrum against itself until it shatters, and yet the bands of color are vast and recognizable enough for a viewer to imagine the painting draped across their shoulders. “I want to wear these paintings” is not a note I was expecting to write, but it’s true! The chaos-portal Tuning the Void is the “Dark Star” of the show. Here the artist builds up scruffy and uncertain primaries into a warm geometric harmony against vulnerable washes of earthen beige. Kunz’s commitment to and faith in pure abstraction is tantamount to these paintings’ success, but what’s really shredding to me here is Kunz’s willingness to let the works act as unfamiliar guests, to invite a certain amount of decorative coziness, to make a jolt of sudden red feel like a secret shared amongst friends.
It’s clear to me that with Paintings to the Full Flower Moon, Kunz is treading confidently down a path tread by giants. The press release drops Paul Klee as an influence, and there are definitely shades of something like Red Balloon (1922) here alongside the grooving forms of Sonia Delaunay and the decisive light-work of Helen Frankenthaler. To me, these eleven works are celestial cousins with Lee Krasner’s geometric Untitleds and Kamrooz Aram’s “Arabesques” (now that’d be a duo show.) It’s an art-historical conversation Kunz deserves to be a part of, one I’m excited to see her continue to engage with, but to this critic her paintings are best enjoyed in the absolute present. It’s the summer of 2024, a year already gutted by uncertainty and scarcity that almost certainly promises more to come in the fall. Looking around, it’s hard not to feel as if the promise of a slow doom has taken root in the collective subconscious. Why do we look at art now? Why would you take the subway knowing it might collapse? Why risk looking someone you don’t know in the eyes? The answer’s the same as it ever was: because you have to. It’s the only thing you can do. It’s the only thing that works. What makes this exhibition so great is Kunz’s insistence on humanity: a devotion with the courage to grasp our hands and pull us along. Kunz’s work reinforces the all-too-primal instinct to conjure up new worlds, not to distract us from our real one but to reaffirm our place as conscious beings. Make the trip and feel whole again. You’ve got two weeks.