Hidden somewhere in the endless maze of symbols and art historical allusions of Antwerp-based painter Kati Heck’s new show is a very simple, comprehensible point. I just haven’t figured it out yet.
On a curved grey wall, Heck has laid out a serpentine journey through art history. There are riffs on Durer and Cranach, nods to mythology and the Old Testament. A wild-haired young woman sits at her notebook, thorned pen in hand. Another woman (or the same, but older maybe?) sits wistfully at a table, cicadas crawling over her arms. A ripped canvas shows ’60s superstar Donovan on a crumbling wall. Adam and Eve stand fruitless beneath a tree. A naked figure stares at her younger self in a mirror. One canvas is filled with cartoon-y scenes of Donald Trump, the Count from ‘Sesame Street’, a mother wiping her toddler’s arse. It’s all unfollowable, dizzying, a whorl of clashing symbolism.
It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t so brilliantly painted, a collision of Hieronymous Bosch, De Chirico and Alice Neel. Every choice is so clearly deliberate, but left entirely unexplained. As you grasp for the meaning of the woman with the flute, the sprouted potato or the smudge of black in a pink sky, you’re sent searching from work to work, scrabbling for narrative, for timeline, for sense. And – I think, I guess – that's the point. This is a meditation on life’s purpose, on the meaning of desire, temptation, politics and, more than anything, the inexorable march of time, the unstoppable tide of ageing. It feels like an artist going ‘man, I am getting old, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense’.
If Heck’s last show here was a messy diary of countless drunken, youthful nights on the piss, this is an acknowledgement that those days are over, and real life, whether we like it or not, is coming for us all.
