Tim Berresheim

Tim Berresheim
Patrick Painter Gallery
Through February 28th

Tim Berresheim works in Cologne, lives in the world of Sigmar Polke, and makes work that reminds me of not only of Polke but also Berresheim’s teacher Albert Oehlen. Also in the work are the strange flavors of the most unusual Americans around, Mike Kelley and Lucas Samaras. Like all of those artists, Berresheim does not hold onto any one medium too closely – for instance in his current Patrick Painter show, he divides his spaces between theatrical, creepy photographic productions and clean cut, properly printed (sort of like a silkscreen but not quite) wood panels. Also like those artists, Berresheim is savvy and talented enough to use all of his mediums well. The result is the work of a bit of a split personality, but a split personality that I’d like to get to know.

In Patrick Painter’s main space, Berresheim presents a group of beautiful, subtle surfaces of either white on white or white on black. Berresheim starts with a photograph, abstracting various structures and constellations, almost expressionist in their passages mixed with curious turns and flips. Perhaps it is Berresheim’s method of letting a machine print these images onto wood panels, but ultimately, the works are not existential or full of too much heavy breathing. Instead, Berresheim trades excessive lyricism in for slick mechanics and perfect surfaces. These images are “barely there” and are dazzling in how mute they are, you have to get in close to notice any image at all at times. If the images were painted, you would immediately think Terry Winters, late Jackson Pollock, or early Oehlen (when he silkscreened computer based drawings), but Berresheim’s use of machinery morphs these planes into something else, hybrid objects that are both unapologetically aesthetic but reticent to be too expressive.

In the Editions location, there’s Berresheim’s other body of work, photographs of interiors, gaudy dioramas with a sort of phallic vase making a repeat appearance along with bowling balls, ficus trees, chain link fence, and hair. These works feel much more derivative than then the prints on wood -- they feel like any number of Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, or most explicitly Lucas Samaras moments of full blown dementia in shocked colors. However, they are exquisitely executed and beam with an understated, mad energy. Again, expression is downplayed. The interiors are empty. Things seem to hide in them.

So, how are we to talk about Berresheim’s diverse work? How is it to be understood? I, for one, feel a little disappointed in the title of his exhibition, Condition Tidiness: Rude, in that it indulges a rampant artworld mistake of simply stating paradox and then quickly being satisfied with paradox as a condition. I don’t think it is the paradox of Berresheim that makes him interesting. Instead I think it is his approach to his work, his energy, his use of a reading of Sigmar Polke that makes him different from many of his contemporaries.

Polke is important to this work, and I hope the reader will indulge me while I tell a story. Seeing the work of Polke for the first time was for me a completely jarring, downright un-American experience. His use of silkscreens and popular imagery did not produce slick pop objects with clean logos and lines like Andy Warhol or James Rosenquist. Polke’s use of color was flagrant, overbearing, and full of a rampant spirit that felt a little mad to me, those German pools of browns and blacks, yellowing and muddy. Americans like their energy at 10 o’clock and on television. Polke is late night and in the dirt.

Polke mixes and matches the wildest things -- gestural painting with collage, slick images with sticky surfaces of linseed, handmade objects with machinery. He’s unpredictable -- when I thought I had Polke pinned, I encountered his lush landscapes, his skies of dappled color. Beauty. It was there all along, and Polke wasn’t afraid of it. I find Polke at the heart of a world that I still struggle to understand, the spiritual and earthy store of German art, a zany place that produces some of the best artwork in the world.

In Berresheim, I found it helpful to think of the breadth and openness of Polke’s practice, not its deconstruction of painting or its critique of American pop. The deconstruction stuff is too sober, too geeky. Instead, I would argue that in Berresheim, we have a shape shifter, a material hound, an escape artist. There is personality to the work yet Berresheim foregoes the posturing and personality cult angle of someone like Jonathon Meese. There is rationality to the work yet at no time is it uninteresting or overbearing. Finally, there is that strange, Samaras-like creepiness.

In this work, we have the ambition of Polke to keep things open and loose, the courage to risk beauty, yet the weirdness to avoid producing it like a factory. It is still way too early in his career to know if Berresheim can sustain this comparison to Polke, but his Patrick Painter show left me optimistic and dazzled.