‘A Year of Rest and Relaxation’ Embraces Uneasy Intimacies

Straddling the line between white cube gallery and cosy city flat, Croy Nielsen occupies the first floor of a bourgeois residential building. The apartment’s current tenants – a small selection of works by four artists – are grouped under the enticing title ‘A Year of Rest and Relaxation’, enhancing the space’s informal atmosphere. Yet, beneath this familiar domesticity, a stranger, less certain reality awaits.

Lukas Kaufmann’s pieces are the first to lure me in. The artist takes his photographic images then sculpturally folds them into fine, grid-like reliefs or wraps them around miniature, wall-mounted dressers. These dainty pieces of furniture are actually enlarged versions of gift boxes from the Viennese artisan chocolatier Altmann & Kühne, to which Kaufmann’s monochrome self-portraits cling like skin. In Untitled (2024), for instance, the artist presents us with a close-up of his bare chest overlaid by slender plant branches, the cast shadows from which beautifully echo his flowing hair. Yet, while these domestic forms offer a soft eroticism, here and there the photographic paper is flayed by small white abrasions, like scars on a child’s knee. These aesthetic glitches speak of Kaufmann’s attention to omission and loss: desire, after all, feeds on absence. A white wrapping ribbon hangs tantalisingly from the handle of one of the drawers, the sweet contents of which are precluded from my reach. 

Nearby, Wojciech Bąkowski’s treatment of paper aims to enhance the psychological charge of his charcoal drawings. By lightly sanding the cardboard sheets, the artist roughens up the surface of the medium to make it almost hairy; when he then sketches his lucid dream-inspired landscapes on it, the lines achieve a blurred and unruly quality. In Inner Museum (2022), for instance, a row of buildings protrudes into the void, the rough surface texture perfectly capturing the coarse asphalt of the street. Whilst Bąkowski’s imagery is rooted in his childhood memories of post-communist Poland, the spectral urban landscapes he depicts feel eerily familiar.

The same can be said of Marlie Mul’s ‘Puddle’ series (2012–16), three of which are scattered across the gallery’s parquet floor. Made of resin, stone and sand, they strike me as bizarrely fleshy, like squashed slugs on a sidewalk. These glistening sculptural forms contain within them deeply banal components: a match sticks out of Puddle (Shallow Match) (2014) as the grey Viennese light, filtered through the gallery windows, bounces lazily off its shiny crust. I tiptoe around them, wondering whether the puddles hide dangerous depths. Just like Kaufmann and Bąkowski, Mul invites viewers to look a little closer at the seemingly dull facades of everyday life – through the lenses of desire, memory and tedium – to see what lurks beneath. 

The exhibition borrows its title from Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, which tells the story of a depressed woman who locks herself inside a fancy Manhattan apartment in an attempt to shed her past identity through a year of pill-induced slumber. Set in 2001, the events of 9/11 loom silently across the book’s pages. Made only a few years earlier, Mitchell Syrop’s I Didn’t Jump I Was Pushed (1998) hangs in Croy Nielsen’s main room. This enlarged New York postcard sees the Manhattan skyline engulfed by sunset’s crimson light, one of the Twin Towers still visible in the distance. In the upper half of the work, letters cut from the sunset are set against a plain black background to form the words ‘I Didn’t Jump’; inversely, in the lower half, the words ‘I Was Pushed’ appear in black letters against the skyline. Here, violence breaks through the smooth skin of mundanity, reminding us that danger often lurks in the most familiar of places.

‘A Year of Rest and Relaxation’ is on view at Croy Nielsen, Vienna, until 10 May

_{Main image: Wojciech Bąkowski, Inner Museum, 2022, charcoal on cardboard, 25.5 × 53 × 3.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Croy Nielsen, Vienna; photograph: kunst-dokumentation.com}