MICHELLE BRANDEMUEHL | Ready for Use | January 5 – February 8, 2025
In Michelle Brandemuehl’s recent paintings, humble formal devices are elevated to symbols of reverence and regality. The visual strength of the paintings stems from Brandemuehl’s ability to steady a composition through subversive deconstruction. Organized around familiar structural systems that are deftly fractured, these compositions come to life by infusing energy into what initially feels askew. Broken lines, mismatched patterns, and misaligned grids—each element contributes to the dynamic tension of the work. It is through this unsettled, almost nervous quality that the paintings reveal their vitality.
“Michelle Brandemuehl’s new solo exhibition “Ready for Use” at Devening Projects is, at first glance, an enjoyable if familiar exploration of painting as painting. Reflexive and self-aware, the mostly duochrome works on view employ the sparest of means to create tense arrangements that foreground their existence as art objects. But lurking somewhere just beyond the threshold of this materialist analysis is a religious show for an a-religious age. An exhibition that probes the nature and relevance of symbolism, meaning, and even the role of the artist as a conduit for creative forces.Central to Brandemuehl’s compositions in “Ready for Use” is the recurring motif of the “X,” or tilted cross. Sometimes fragmented, sometimes complete, these forms serve as both stabilizing and destabilizing forces, often set against grids that appear stitched together from separate works but are revealed, upon inspection, to be continuous unified planes. The “X” is especially intriguing: it marks, subverts, divides and unifies, embodying a tension that suggests a multiplicity of provocative interpretations.” — Alan Pocaro, “Paintings for an A-Religious Age: A Review of Michelle Brandemuehl at Devening Projects” in New City
“Although today primarily associated with the Christian tradition, the cross is as ancient as it is pregnant with symbolism. It represents (among many other things) not only the form of man, but also the intersection of time and space, and the union of the terrestrial and the celestial orders. Brandemuehl’s fragmented forms resemble elements of the Greek cross, a symmetrical “X” figure evoking classical concepts of synthesis and balance. This balance is especially evident in works such as “Sea Captain Straight,” “Sun Ray,” and “No Dog in This Fight” whose acute black rays are augmented with curved blue lines that bring equilibrium to the anxiety of opposites in union.” — Alan Pocaro, “Paintings for an A-Religious Age: A Review of Michelle Brandemuehl at Devening Projects” in New City
In Ready for Use — inspired by Richard Tuttle’s quote “Pictures… you don’t want them to be finished, you want them ready for use” — Brandemuehl’s new work carries a sense of being “al dente,” with something held back, unrevealed, close to but not quite done. Through restraint and minimal mark-making, she searches for something unseen, relying on repetition and chance. The work invites the viewer to trust their intuition and interpretation of abstraction and the unknown.
