Tamara K.E.

Galerie Nusser & Baumgart, Munich
Through December 22

You never got me down is the slogan that Tamara K.E., whose real name is Tamara Khundadze, superimposes over her portrayal of a seemingly self-satisfied, well-fed man, seen in his study, in front of a writing desk, with a gun in hand. Framed quite unflatteringly from a low vantage point, the image appears to represent an individual who has decided to take control of his destiny. Is the idea of the Regenerated Man—the show’s title—really the inherent message, though? Or does it refer to an ironic re-reading of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, which is referenced by another two painting?

These large-scale paintings, with the apparently nonsensical title Olé Mexico, are almost photographic in their realism, showing in magnified detail, slightly out of focus, a female pubis on which poses a tiny, singing angel.

Tamara K.E.’s aim with her installations and paintings, undertaken with a sardonic grin, is to throw open for debate our usual visual experiences and conditioned cognitive structures. With imagery culled from photographs, advertisements, magazines, or television, often cropped in unusual ways, her work introduces banal themes and particulars that in their fragmentary nature are not just contextually and conceptually alienated from one another, but are also alienating—the images are out of focus not only on an aesthetic plane, but also on a semantic one.

As is typical in magazines and advertisements, the artist often couples text and image; such an approach, however, follows apparently accidental and disconcerting criteria that make it difficult to grasp the work in a precise sense. In this way the artist urges viewers to delve into their cultural repertory to try to find a meaningful tie between the elements, only to promptly dispatch them. “The fascinating experience of the absurd” is born out of this subversion of meaning and its signifier, freeing us from our “historic” state and conditioning by a conventional system of references.

Tamara K.E.’s work, therefore, besides offering a reflection on our cognitive and communicative structures and on the relations between the male and female worlds, conceals a subtle critique of the preconceived structures of Western society.




Valérie Bussmann