KENNY SCHACHTER  Phone Face

31/08/2024 – 25/10/2024

Galerie Nagel Draxler
Elisenstraße 4-6
50667 Köln

Eröffnung: Freitag, 30. August 2024, 18 – 21 Uhr
Opening: Friday, August 30, 2024, 6 – 9 pm

DC OPEN:
Samstag, 31. August 2024, 13 – 19 Uhr
Saturday, August 31, 2024, 1 – 7pm
Sonntag, 1. September 2024, 13 – 17 Uhr
Sunday, September 1, 2024, 1 – 5pm

Öffnungszeiten / Opening hours:
Mittwoch - Freitag 11 – 18 Uhr, Samstag 11 – 16 Uhr
Wednesday - Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 4pm

The term »photo-face« describes the posed expressions people adopt for pictures. But as fingertips dance across the glass of smartphones, extending this concept to the digital age, a new kind of »phone face« emerges, reflecting the mask of detachment shaped by prolonged screen exposure.  It reveals the somatic poetry of contemporary existence, where the soul’s preoccupation with screens shapes the contours of our physical presence. It is the visage of those lost in the digital ether, dissolving into the glowing screen. Not merely a look but a silent symphony of absorption, where every furrowed brow and vacant stare becomes a verse in the poem of digital devotion. The face, rendered blank and distant, becomes a canvas upon which the pixels of virtual realms cast their spell.

Kenny Schachter’s art is a playful yet critical engagement with contemporary culture. He explores how Instagram and other platforms have transformed the way art is experienced, communicated, and consumed. This exhibition serves as a provocative commentary on the evolving relationship between traditional media, the digital world, the art market and the CODE that pulses beneath these surfaces.

At the center of the installation are 22 cube-shaped sculptures made of painted aluminum, which are randomly arranged as if in a linguistic (dice) game with shaped words from the vocabulary of today's tech and social media world. They embody a kind of index of the present, which will probably soon be historical again.

For a series of paintings, he is using other’s talented hands or robotic arms to colorize canvases, translating–pixel per pixel–his digital creations. Each MEME a fleeting whisper of collective consciousness, ephemer, yet now becoming material. The gallery wall opens each FILE in a new widget, a display with many open tabs.

One could POST »Kenny Can’t Paint«. He’d see the ANGR in their statement and would find the right answer in his conceptual approach.  Schachter has recently become known for his life-size sculptures of art world protagonists such as Yayoi Kusama, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beeple and Jerry Saltz. Adapting, quoting, deconstructing, and reassembling, he is a self-styled provocateur and as such, referencing Kippenberger, he is putting his own sculpture in the corner, shamefully, with red paint dripping down the wall: Kenny Can’t Paint. The fiberglas cast is dressed for comfort, flirting with a mischievous smile, red suspenders holding black vintage adidas. Once a response to criticism of Kippenberger[1] not doing justice to his role as part of the serious art world, it now is a meta-commentary on the flux of contemporary culture in the realm of the ism ism ism ism.

The observer might freeze again, shocked to remember their BYTE-sized dreams and CHIP-controlled realities and slip into their own glassy veneer of the Phone Face. »Forgetting algorithms and censorship—but that too—rather, focusing on the paradigm shift social media has had/is having on our lives in every conceivable way, especially in relationship to art. Social, political, economic and geographic boundaries have been blurred while shifting hegemonies and prophylactic limitations have been imposed by the new order of things. Yes, certain historical hierarchies and barriers to entry were smashed, only to be replaced by others.« In this FLEX of modernity, we are caught between the raw COOL of new tools and the perpetual FOMO of the ever-reeling social reel. The JPEGs reflect our quest for validation, each LIKE a testament to our online existence. This world, a rich tapestry of DATA and discourse, is where the Phone Face finds its most profound meaning—a symbol of our times, an emblem of our digital dance.

Schachter’s works are formed by a cyclical translation between media. With Phone Face, his second solo show with the gallery, he presents new sculptures, installation, painting, alongside digital extensions of these works. The exhibition premieres the collaboration with MakersPlace. Simultaneously with the exhibition opening, all works will be presented on the digital art marketplace.

Text: Maja Funke

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[1] Martin Kippenberger: Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich (Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself), 1989

 

Explore the exhibition on MakersPlace

About MakersPlace

MakersPlace is the premier fine-art marketplace to discover and buy authentic digital art from the world’s leading artists. Our mission is simple: to enable a vibrant future for digital creativity. Launched in 2018, MakersPlace helped catapult digital art onto the global stage with the historic sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million in partnership with Christie’s auction house in March 2021 — the record price for any digital artwork at that time.

MakersPlace stands at the forefront of an exciting new era in art, where digital and physical worlds converge. Its future initiatives focus on deepening collaborations with top-tier web3 artists and expanding partnerships with world-class galleries and curators. MakersPlace is committed to catalyzing this transformative movement, continually pushing the boundaries of art and technology.

Further links

"Christine Tien Wang and Kenny Schachter Get Real About Art World Economics", Interview Magazine, 30.08.2024
"An Interview with Kenny Schachter on Collecting, Curating and Creating", Art&Object, 29.08.2024
"Phone Faces, NFT-ism, and Meme Culture Alphabet Blocks — Interview with Kenny Schachter", MakersPlace, 20.08.2024