NYAB Event - Bernard Ammerer “Interface”

Bernard Ammerer “Interface”

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

This event has ended.

In his first solo show in the United States at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Bernard Ammerer depicts a private domain of desolate landscapes and vaguely restless figures that would border on the surreal if it didn’t feel so eerily familiar. Across the exhibition’s dozen canvases—all from this year and last—we see small cliques of physically and psychologically isolated people at uneasy rest or in frantic motion; cloud-filled skies looming serenely over flat, featureless, stark-white plains; and lone travelers in obscure territories that are shrouded in fog, reduced to cartoonish black silhouettes, or completely replaced with generic words—Wood, Field—that diminish nature to a worthless and empty abstraction.

Ammerer’s pointed and ironic titles often hint at the somber thread of disaffection that ties these works together. Interface—a six-foot-square canvas depicting a constellation of nondescript young men in jeans and t-shirts frozen mid-leap in a white void—is most notable for the palpable lack of physical and psychological interaction among its inhabitants. Fulfillment Problem—that bland euphemism from the realm of online commerce that so often signifies corporate ineptitude and consumer frustration—is paired with the image of a cloudy yellowish sky overrun with a chaotic, maze-like swarm of identical running figures lifted from a Children At Play traffic safety sign. The infantile and perpetually unsatisfying urge toward instant gratification that’s satirized here is subtly underscored by Boyhood, which presents the sad and wistful disembodied head of a child floating alone in a dark, nebulous space. It’s the only place in these works where an actual face can be seen, and its stark difference from the other canvasses hints at an irrevocable loss of naive serenity that no hoard of shiny toys, transient pleasures, or wanderlust can amend. The moral—for Ammerer’s oblivious protagonists as well as us—is perhaps best embodied in Home, with its ghostly white house at the end of a blank path in a barren field: far too often, our ill-considered quests away from ourselves in pursuit of the Next Perfect Thing leave us alone and exhausted before a hollow apparition.

Bernard Ammerer lives and works in Vienna. He graduated University für angewandte Kunst, Wien in 2010 and is the recipient of the Strabag Art Award.