The New Generation by Bjarne Melgaard

Misha Kahn: Branded by the design world as bizarre, in art terms Misha Kahn’s sculptural furniture pieces play a role that is uncommon but perfectly relatable: They serve the function of furniture, and if they look like and feel like furniture, they must be furniture. And yet, the alchemy that goes into each of his pieces imbues them with such a dynamic formal profile that they are often pose more questions that conventional art objects. “Kahn’s objects are like lamps and sculptures that invite you into a landscape where you suddenly realize you can’t escape. Always in control and giving up at the same time, his ideas encapsulate worlds we didn’t know we needed.”

South of the Border Heels, 2012. Wood, paint, and leather. Feature production: Max Hirschberger.

Movie Star Maps, 2014. Hand painted mural. Photo: Michael Underwood.

Alex Israel: From monolithic sunglass lenses and prefab paintings of sunsets to his talk show as it lays—which summoned cult specters like Kato Kaelin, Molly Ringwald,
and Vidal Sassoon to the couch—Alex Israel subjects the iconographies of Los Angeles to an idolatry that injects their intrinsic flatness with depth. “His work to me is about the real, complete configuration of superficiality in all ways, both artistically and in terms of context.”

Lens (blue), 2013. UV protective acrylic. Photo: Jean–Baptiste Beranger.

Andra Ursuta: From humanoid figures to psychologically informed shapes, Andra Ursuta casts sculptures that evoke her innermost fears and at once are universally resonant as monuments to archetypal forms of anguish. “At times Ursuta manages to capture the complexity and endless problems of existential loneliness we all are trying so hard to pretend we don’t feel. A sorrowful Klu Klux Klan member staring out of a window into nothing? How much more precise can questions about the ruins of our civilization get?”

Broken Obelisk, 2013. Aquaresin and chair. Photo: Peep-hole, 2014.

Haribo: Haribo is a band made up of the artists Raul de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple. Their shows are maximally destructive, sloppily straddling art and performance in such a way that gives hope to an anti-commercial union of the two in our post-Lady Gaga era. “They are a reminder of how some people just can’t stop being compulsively creative, and they are good at it in a really kind of bad way that gives a fresh feel to a rather dying art landscape called New York.”

Hell is Where I Die. Photo: Jessie Stead, January 2014.

Katie Stout: The furniture and furnishings Katie Stout makes serve recognizable purposes, like holding a plant or covering a floor, but her sculptural extrapolations pull them away from terrestrial functions and towards absurdity. “Lacking any pretense of skillfulness or creative meaning, stout perverts anything she touches with a sublime hand. She makes objects that are there to delete your whole atmosphere, objects for evenings where everything goes wrong and you secretly enjoy it.”

Lamp in collaboration with Sean Gerstley. Volcano curtain in collaboration with Kate Fox. Photo: Clemens Kois.

Lamp in collaboration with Sean Gerstley. Photo: Clemens Kois.

Lucas Blalock: Lucas Blalock’s vibrant still lifes freeze time in order to extend it indefinitely. He shoots analog 4×5 photographs and imports them into Photoshop where a single moment can be elaborated upon for hours and a flat image can become a vessel for an unbounded sequence of additive enhancements. He runs humor through
a vacuum: bright and buoyant, without contextual frames or stylistic continuity his subjects—hotly lit hot dogs, digitally abstracted wood grain, limbs draped on pantone paper, a ball and chain juxtaposed by musical notes on a crumpled sheet—are simultaneously presented as inviting and unnervingly plastic.

Double Shadow, 2013-2014.

Raul de Nieves: Whether painstakingly adorning impossibly crystalline women’s shoes (with more crystals), or eviscerating the stage or some manifestation of himself in an unruly performance, Raul de Nieves is squarely on his own path, developing a lived vocabulary of objects and events that propose questions about identity, glamour, pleasure, and chaos. “The idea of the shiny object and making things for boys that look like they’re done for girls makes raul one of the most intense players of gender and feminine motions versus masculine gestures in New York today.”

Pena & Jo (the Art of Comfort). Image courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Dobson: Dried up leaves, deflated river rafts, photorealistic cotton weavings, and New Yorker cartoons are some of the oddly familiar miscellany that Tyler Dobson enlists to make a show. He maintains a deliberately inscrutable practice and yet at the same time there’s a generosity to the way he coalesces cultural and emotional referents that avail themselves to viewers without explanation. “Tyler Dobson’s installations are a world inhabited by dumb objects, mishaps, and badly made jokes about bands we all start to hate. Dobson shows us that the unintentional still has an effect on us.”

Untitled by Tyler Dobson and Whitney Claflin, 2014. Digital image.

Saturday Morning Fan, 2013. Resin, pigment, and fan. Photo: Clemens Koi.

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The New Generation by Bjarne Melgaard

The New Generation by Bjarne Melgaard

Issue No. 25 FW 2024–25