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.
