Adapting its title from Edwin Abott Abott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884, this 12-artist group show is a rewarding ode on the visceral and intellectual joys of painting’s invented planes. Disparate styles are precisely placed alongside one another, harmonizing and holding their own, like Dena Yago’s graphic and ultraflat Sweet Taste of the Aftermath, 2022, hanging next to Jeremy Glogan’s wonky and glutinous Building, 2021. Everything addresses the inherent abstraction in rendering, inventing and transcribing, as in Anne Speier’s MO-MI, 2022, a luscious reduction of a grocery advertisement. If Flatland, the romance, was a satire of class structure and the inability to accept the unknown, then Flatlands conjures not just artists, but painters as those who create and expose the many realities within the confines that life gives us.
Flatlands curated by Rachal Bradley and Inka Meißner, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich, 2022, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich
The fact that one of the best group exhibitions of painting in recent memory is curated by two artists, London-based Rachal Bradley (who has shown with Staiger since the beginning) and Berlin-based Inka Meißner, neither of whom are painters, in the traditional sense, shouldn’t be lost on anyone.
Flatlands curated by Rachal Bradley and Inka Meißner, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich, 2022, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich
Flatlands, curated by Rachal Bradley & Inka Meißner, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Limmatstrasse 268, Zürich, November 12, 2022–January 21, 2023