Call me if you get lost / Hannah Beerman
19 January - 4 March, 2023
Claas Reiss
96 Robert Street
London NW1 3QP
Claas Reiss is pleased to present ‘Call me if you get lost’ with new works by New York City based artist Hannah Beerman in her first exhibition in the UK and an exhibition text by Natalie Power.
‘Outfitted with the likes of seashells, inhalers and jaggedly cut images of neoclassical people with their yearning, seraphic eyes, Hannah Beerman’s work is unabashedly brimming over, spilling out and tumbling forth. Loosely restrained by a limp fishnet or bound by an austere gang of jacket zippers, the pieces are pointedly animate—incapable of being managed or contained, teasing at crawling off of the canvas altogether when no one is looking. While the material items concerned are the stuff of everyday lowbrow, Beerman takes care to lend credence to each misfit treasure—a pincushion sits omnisciently atop the frame as a collaged figure gazes wistfully up; photographed tulips keel tiredly over, anchored in place by Crayola-grade clay handles and sutured up by a lawless stapler.
Beerman’s pieces are an exercise in deliberate, deadpan humor, appearing nearly edible in their thick-dolloped paint, dusted over with crumbled soil and glitter. Twin tubes of Vicks vapor inhalers, designed for some kind of modern convenience, hang from their keychains like erotic jewelry. A lone boxer trudges forward into a purplish cave. Dual images of a cartoonish desk lamp are plastered like trading cards atop straining romantic women while sea scallops clamor insistently upward. But to chalk it all up to some haphazard play, some serendipitous experiment, would be a sore disservice to the art. Beerman is in the tough business of heeding the specific, cellular needs of each piece, dutifully attuning herself to the very pulse of the work—an undertaking that is at once exacting, sacred and unwieldy.
The keen sensitivity with which Beerman labors is precisely what breathes such palpable life into the works, sending them bubbling over stretcher bars and inching across walls. Taking cues from the oracular phenomenon of psychoanalysis, which Beerman researches, she repels willingly into chasms of both conscious and unconscious making, dipping unflinchingly into the ineffable and illusive, reappearing from the depths with the kind of work that can only be wrought by real audacity. Beerman embodies the authentic, often mythologized role of a true artist, acting as a faithful, solitary conduit for forces beyond what is known and digestible. She presses gladly into untested territories, extracting the kind of artwork that nearly feels fabled today—pieces that are heaving with breath, that are telling secrets, cracking jokes, winking an eye.’
(Natalie Power, January 2022)
Hannah Beerman (born 1992 in Nyack, NY) graduated with BA from Bard College in 2015 and MFA Painting from Hunter College in New York City in 2019. Selected solo or duo exhibitions include ‘Cult Classic’ (2021) at Kapp Kapp in New York City, ’Sunspots and Underpants’ at T293 in Rome, Italy, and more recently ‘As Above, So Below’, a duo show curated by Barry Schwabsky at the Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton, NY, and ‘Friends & Family’ at Anton Kern’s WINDOW in New York City. Beerman’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Claas Reiss in January 2023 is her first exhibition in the UK. Beerman lives and works in New York City.