Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
—Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
On a visit to Soft Opening, Antonia Marsh shows me one of four images cited as reference for the show Staub (Störung) featuring new works by German artist Maren Karlson. One catches my eye: a document scan with a photograph and caption that reads “Staubbelastung im Erzegebirge” [dust pollution in the Erzebirge]. In the photograph, the word “Staub” is written, unconjoined, into a substance coating a recent snowfall. “Staub,” in German, means dust. “The uranium falls onto the snow,” Antonia tells me, “and someone writes out the word.” It’s curiously literal, transcribing a noun into the matter it describes.
Staub (Störung) is the product of the artist’s play and subsequent visual dissection of documentary photographs of Kombinat VEB chemische Weke Buna, a chemical factory in Schkopau, East Germany. These photographs are banal and obsolete, intended originally as documents of the factory’s decay, and beautiful only to the subjective viewer (bringing to mind Andre Breton’s found objects – picked up at the Puces de Saint Ouen flea market in Paris – which are equally banal and equally revered). The chemical plant, initially privately owned, transferred into a state-owned enterprise after the establishment of the GDR, falling into disrepair sometime in the 1980s. At Soft Opening, which, incidentally, was a factory before it was a white cube space, Karlson transforms these remnants of Soviet-backed industry into a series of nine canvas works and seven drawings. It’s a world-building exercise akin to the surrealist tenet of recombining and presenting the facile in sublime ways.
Visually, Karlson’s work merges traditional abstraction with science fiction realism. Lee Lozano’s brash animism meets HR Giger’s sensual perversion. One of the prime features of Karlson’s method is taking the functional - knob, screw, hinge - and abstracting it to be just recognisable. She doesn’t do away with the veristic. Mechanical digits are animated into fetus-like substances which gestate in a large fleshy expanse of beige, grey, and earth tones. Metal fragments appear like teratomas, immature human tissue, on Karlson’s canvases. I find these moments in which the mechanic is anthropomorphised surprisingly touching.
Staub (Störung)’s press release paints the artist, quite obtusely, as a radical political agent. Karlson takes what Mark Fisher labels “the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities’ (ruined factories) and turns it into an alien future (post-industry and post-capital). As in the painted work, Staub Störung 9. Antonia directs me to the corner of the photograph the canvas depicts; it’s nondescript, as expected – Karlson prioritises “background noise” – but one can make out two cylindrical shapes, motifs the artist has recycled in both the canvas and the drawn work Staub 1 (s). On the picture plane, these industrial elements are placed in an ear-like shape. Here, Karlson enacts the biomechanical merging of flesh and machine (comparisons to the work of Tristan Hsu, who showed in Hardcore (2023) at Sadie Coles, feel apt. Hsu’s silicone sculptures convey a sense of the human form gestating in an industrial, factory-made mould). Indeed, Staub Storung 9 resembles an incubator from the Alien franchise as much as it does a hearing aid. As industry accelerates and old technology is left behind, the feeble human body meets the outdated machine.
The sketches at the back of the gallery demonstrate the skill, craft and engineering involved in Karlson’s image manipulation and gestural science fiction. In Staub 4, Karlson takes an inkjet print – an enlarged section of one of the documents – and “affects structural logic” by connecting the worn-away segments with a foreign ectoplasm rendered in graphite. It’s not a material native to the factory or even this world, but a third, more fictional substance that, I infer, is its own independent, organic lifeform.
Karlson doesn’t appear as a satirical painter. Her works don’t embody any kind of pop-referentiality, and her style does not seem to refute any mainstay trend. These works are a refreshingly complex form of abstraction that complicates and engages with the value of representation. A science-fictional method of formal dissection brings Maren Karlson’s work into dialogue with ideas of the Anthropocene and the longing to integrate human and non-human matter. In the last drawing of the show, the word “Staub” (dust) is overlaid across a vast Piranesian chamber, an ominous prophecy of imminent (human) disintegration.
