Infected Foot

Monika Baer

Thomas Bayrle

Tony Conrad

Michaela Eichwald

Jana Euler

Genoveva Filipovic

Andrea Fourchy / Sergej Jensen

Michael Krebber

Mathieu Malouf

Laura Owens

Paul Sharits

Reena Spaulings

Josef Strau

Stefan Tcherepnin

Amelie von Wulffen

Greene Naftali is pleased to announce Infected Foot, a cross-generational group show of artists who disrupt the formal and conceptual parameters of painting. Taking its title from Paul Sharits’s 1982 mixed media work, Foot Infection III—in which the obsessive rendering of a foot infection radially consumes and ultimately exceeds its rectangular borders—the exhibition focuses on artists for whom disruption breeds dissemination. Stemming from a common social network—many affiliated with Frankfurt’s Städelschule—the artists in Infected Foot assume an antagonistic posture to address specific art world operations and legacies. The works on view represent various strategies of negation, revision, and at times perversion. Certain canvases show the expressionist hallmark of gesture evacuated by way of mechanical simulation or trenchant ventriloquism. Others contain limited marks incongruous with the monumental scale to which they are applied. Authorship is blurred or relinquished entirely; figures are excavated from art history to reappear in contemporary drag; and portraiture is directed away from the pathos of the human face and onto the absurdity of an animal visage.