{"id":2045411,"date":"2026-07-15T18:35:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T15:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2045411"},"modified":"2026-07-15T18:35:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T15:35:54","slug":"at-management-gallery-the-grotesque-evolves-for-the-doomscroll-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2045411","title":{"rendered":"At Management Gallery, the Grotesque Evolves for the Doomscroll Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThe third episode of 2026\u2019s breakout show on Apple TV,\u00a0Widow\u2019s Bay<\/em>, ends with the creature of the week\u2014the perpetually sopping Sea Hag\u2014astride her prey:\u00a0cynical\u00a0mayor\u00a0Tom Loftis, played by Matthew\u00a0Rhys.\u00a0He\u2019d\u00a0been warned.\u00a0Her\u00a0preferred\u00a0method of murder is asphyxiation (she sits on your face).\u00a0Pinned\u00a0beneath\u00a0her rotting legs\u00a0in\u00a0his recliner chair,\u00a0Loftis\u00a0narrowly escapes by\u00a0yanking\u00a0its\u00a0lever,\u00a0catapulting\u00a0the\u00a0hag\u00a0over his head.\u00a0The spell breaks; dread collapses with a laugh.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Widow\u2019s Bay<\/em> was nominated for 19 Emmys\u00a0last week, an unusual honor for a series\u00a0committed to bodily indignity.\u00a0Yet its success feels\u00a0less like an anomaly than a\u00a0symptom\u00a0of\u00a0the present, in which perpetual\u00a0crisis\u00a0has\u00a0robbed\u00a0the future of\u00a0coherence.\u00a0Cyclically, art history shows how social and political turmoil is metabolized into transgressive imagery:\u00a0Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s sun-bleached creature tearing itself apart on the eve of the Spanish Civil War; Francis Bacon\u2019s screaming\u00a0meat\u00a0men; Carolee Schneemann\u00a0unruly unraveling\u00a0the rules\u00a0of material, muse, and taboo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe aesthetic has a name: the grotesque, where\u00a0horror and humor perform a peculiar emotional alchemy, giving\u00a0form\u00a0to\u00a0otherwise abstract\u00a0anxieties.\u00a0Declawed by comedy, fear becomes something the viewer can safely confront,\u00a0or simply name.\u00a0What\u2019s\u00a0down there? Sometimes desire disguised as disgust.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEnter\u00a0\u201cThe New Grotesque,\u201d a stress test for this psychological tool. On view at New York\u2019s Management Gallery, the exhibition treats the grotesque as an aesthetic on the verge of mutation. If every era produces the grotesque it requires, what form does it take when violence, desire, and spectacle no longer linger at the margins, but stream endlessly through our screens? When technology watches us\u2014and when the images it serves grow increasingly untethered from belief\u2014what, exactly, is left to laugh at?\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and Management, New York. Photo by Inna Svyatsky\/installshots.art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe show was curated by the\u00a0gallery\u2019s\u00a0director,\u00a0Anton Svyatsky, who has\u00a0assembled a stellar intergenerational spread from\u00a0private collections, local galleries, and foreign\u00a0outfits. A slobbering drunk\u00a0horse greets visitors at the door; take a\u00a0left\u00a0for a\u00a0sinister\u00a0eight-piece\u00a0gouache\u00a0fairy tale\u00a0by the Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska. Ahead is the\u00a0show\u2019s\u00a0apparent\u00a0anchor,\u00a0a heady bust from David Altmejd. Decapitated, the fairy of\u00a0Smoking with Oneself<\/em>\u00a0(2021\u201326) puffs a cigarette from the gaping red maw of her throat. Even in pieces, the self insists: an unbothered face fashioned from trachea and bone takes a drag, too.\u00a0As Svyatsky put it, compared with documentary imagery, \u201csurrealism absolves the viewer by suspending moral judgment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA\u00a0Canadian sculptor represented by David Kordansky,\u00a0Altmejd\u00a0has long\u00a0explored the\u00a0porous\u00a0membrane between body and soul.\u00a0That preoccupation becomes the exhibition\u2019s throughline, resurfacing in another coup for Management: two untitled pencil drawings by Miriam Cahn,\u00a0whose 2023 censorship controversy in Paris\u00a0demonstrated\u00a0that the grotesque still has the power to unsettle institutions.\u00a0She\u2019s\u00a0represented\u00a0here by a woman dematerializing headfirst,\u00a0seemingly outlived\u00a0only by her pendulous breasts, and a sparse landscape where a spectral figure peeks up from the bottom edge.\u00a0Setting up a funny little fright on the\u00a0adjacent\u00a0wall:\u00a0Tim Brawner\u2019s acrylic postcard from the uncanny valley, featuring chic mannequin heads and\u00a0there\u2014in the corner\u2014a furious man with twin red suns for eyes cresting the horizon.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Korean painter Jang Pa, represented by Kukje Gallery, makes her U.S. debut here with\u00a0Gore Deco\u2014Grinning Viscera #1<\/em>\u00a0(2026), a large, bloody portrait of\u00a0psychological\u00a0baggage. Madly sentient guts spill from the sitter\u2019s back in swollen rivulets. The figure is shockingly poised, as if this were just another dull Tuesday. It\u00a0probably was. Pa\u2019s\u00a0Gore Deco<\/em>\u00a0series imagines the hearts of marginalized people\u2014women, gender-nonconforming, and queer people\u2014as pressure cookers: feverish, crushed against their cages, and rabid to unload on their oppressors. Nothing about it is pretty. What a relief.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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An installation view of \u201cThe New Grotesque\u201d, including Gore Deco \u2013 Grinning Viscera #1 <\/em>(2026) by Jang Pa and Sibylle Ruppert\u2019s Le Chant de Maldoror<\/em> (1978).\t<\/span>Courtesy of Management, New York. Photography by Inna Svyatsky\/installshots.art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe strongest works in\u00a0The New Grotesque<\/em>\u00a0ingloriously depict the female body as\u00a0qualified and discarded in equal measure, a battlefield on which wars over propriety are fought. The grotesque offers a\u00a0reprieve\u2014if not liberation, then at least a means of expression. Beside Pa\u2019s painting\u00a0hangs\u00a0the oldest work in the exhibition, and one of its gems: Sibylle Ruppert\u2019s\u00a0Le Chant de\u00a0Maldoror\u00a0<\/em>(1978), a charcoal drawing of\u00a0eldritch\u00a0carnality\u00a0and half-realized metamorphosis. Tentacles, spider legs, human genitalia\u2014it\u2019s\u00a0all\u00a0stock\u00a0in the same\u00a0infernal\u00a0stew.\u00a0A casual observer might mistake Ruppert for\u00a0the Swiss artist\u00a0H. R. Giger, whose biomechanical aesthetic became synonymous with\u00a0the\u00a0Alien\u00a0<\/em>franchise.\u00a0They were peers and, by some accounts, mutual admirers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut while Giger achieved international fame, Ruppert shunned the spotlight and gradually faded into obscurity.\u00a0Giger also left behind a far slimier\u00a0legacy,\u00a0one\u00a0long\u00a0criticized for its gratuitous victimization of women. Born in 1946 amid the bombing of Frankfurt, Ruppert instead developed a psychosexual cosmology\u00a0that rejected neat distinctions between prey and predator.\u00a0In Ruppert\u2019s hands, monstrosity is not a fall from humanity but an admission\u00a0of\u00a0it.\u00a0Desire\u00a0makes\u00a0animals of us.\u00a0Love\u00a0leaves us alien to ourselves. The grotesque refuses to look away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/reviews\/at-management-gallery-grotesque-art-evolves-for-the-doomscroll-era-1234792218\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Copy-of-_DSF3899-Edit.jpg?w=1024″] The third episode of 2026\u2019s breakout show on Apple TV,\u00a0Widow\u2019s Bay, ends with the creature of the week\u2014the perpetually sopping Sea Hag\u2014astride her prey:\u00a0cynical\u00a0mayor\u00a0Tom Loftis, played by Matthew\u00a0Rhys.\u00a0He\u2019d\u00a0been warned.\u00a0Her\u00a0preferred\u00a0method of murder is asphyxiation (she sits on your face).\u00a0Pinned\u00a0beneath\u00a0her rotting legs\u00a0in\u00a0his recliner chair,\u00a0Loftis\u00a0narrowly escapes by\u00a0yanking\u00a0its\u00a0lever,\u00a0catapulting\u00a0the\u00a0hag\u00a0over his head.\u00a0The spell breaks; dread collapses with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2045411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2045411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2045411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2045411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2045411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}