Contributed by Patrick Bell / When the world stops making sense so does the body; the figure comes apart at the seams and becomes grotesque. “New Grotesque” at Management gathers 15 artists around this idea and the fact that the horror of the 2020s isn’t just lived but also streamed and thereby exaggerated and filtered. Where Bosch, Goya, and Ensor had war and plague of their own, a different kind of suffering is fed to us through the endless scroll. Management’s current show reflects the view that the grotesque has had to mutate to keep pace with the world. The distended, leaking forms here often make humans seem more like animals, machines, or meat than people.
Tag: David Altmejd
Felix Beaudry’s malleable boys
Contributed by Bill Arning / There is something wildly compelling when an installation flips on you—reversing itself in meaning and affect if you linger more than five minutes. Felix Beaudry’s “Malleable Boys” at Situations is one of those shows. On first entry, oversized, lumpy, monstrous heads loom and encircle you like funhouse demons. They feel nightmarish—deformed, melting, mid-metamorphosis into dangerous humanoid creatures. But stay a beat longer and the menace softens. They become almost cute, like huggable, overgrown Cabbage Patch Kids—less terrifying than misunderstood.

























