The work of Jochen Schmith, a collective composed of artists Carola Wagenplast, Peter Hoppe and Peter Steckroth, addresses contemporary consumerism, aesthetic signifiers of lifestyle and luxury fetishism in a way that’s both subtle and razor-sharp. The commercial, the institutional, and the mediated are under close scrutiny in their practice, which ranges from objects and installations to audiovisual works and radical spatial interventions, such as the one they undertook in the Amsterdam artist-run space W139 (It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But We Like It), 2011): the gallery floor was covered with a rough, ink-black, tarmac-like material mixed with a small, glittering particle. On the other end of the spectrum are works such as There Was a Time (2007), an audio piece consisting of advertisers’ descriptions of luxury housing in Hong Kong; or smaller objects such as Cigar Ends – Collectors’ Waste (2010), a bronze cast of a cigar collected from an art fair VIP lounge. In “Present Gifts,” their current solo show at VI, VII, Oslo, they further investigate commercial and political power structures with works such as Lazy Bones (2014), an embroidered canvas mocking the fake splatters of paint used by designers such as Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana on their so-called “painters pants;” or with Spinning Object (2014), a carousel of 53 slides listing gifts exchanged between politicians, economists and individuals in foreign states. (Maaike Lauwaert)

In Why is the No Video Signal Blue? Or, Color is No Longer Separable From Form, and the Collective Joins the Brightness Confound  (2011) Andrew Norman Wilson deconstructs the linguistic and symbolic convention that usually communicates the signal’s absence on any screen or projector. In Derridian way he shows that this blue’s metaphysical meaning is generated by an invisible game from which the individual is excluded. The blue’s detracted ontological presence leads to a never-ending displacement of its meaning’s grounds, giving rise to a feeling of precariousness that Wilson relates to our dematerialized environment. Opening up the linguistic level to a broader framework, the New York-based artist explores social arrangements or systems of objects, both seen as taxonomic, regardless of whether they are real or fictious, offline or online. Wilson’s videos, performative installations, screenings and web-based projects employ the communication, aesthetic and operative modes of economic and knowledge production in the semio-capitalist age thus showing, in reverse, their modernist, utopian side. As in Uncertainty Seminars (2013), his most recent “guided meditation” which will be displayed in collaboration with Nick Bastis at Fluxia, Milan, Wilson’s practice encourages us to recognize abstractions and to physically embody them in order to have possibility to participate in an actual adherence, a proximity to reality and realness. (Bianca Stoppani)

Employing media ranging from hand-drawn vinyl transfers to appropriated body jewelry, Sam Pulitzer’s work examines the process by which gestures of counter-cultural transgression gradually become codified and assimilated. For a 2011 show at Los Angeles’s Anat Ebgi, for instance, the artist repeatedly pierced the gallery walls with one-inch gauged metal ear plugs; in recasting the white cube as a bodily form, he questioned the possibility of subversive activity in an environment which aestheticizes, and thus renders impotent, any attempts at nonconformity. A 2012 solo exhibition curated by Michele D’Aurizio at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome saw him adorning the space with vinyl transfers of stark, vaguely cartoonish illustrations whose allusions to anarchistic politics, goth fashion, punk and black metal music and fantasy literature were translated into highly stylized graphic renderings. Now, an upcoming solo exhibition at New York’s Artists Space set to open on March 16, titled “A Colony for ‘Them’,” will find the artist installing an elaborate architectural labyrinth within the gallery space. Densely coating the structure’s walls with vinyl transfers of various commissioned illustrations and texts, Pulitzer will again ask the viewer to decipher a set of slogans and symbols whose cultural meanings are at once dependent upon and ultimately diluted by the context of their presentation. (Christopher Schreck)

Rachel de Joode is a great connoisseur of surfaces—wet, smooth, crumpled, drooping. The Dutch-born, Berlin-based multi-media artist conflates the mediums of photography and sculpture via photorealist sulpture and sculptural photography. Her works distort familiar structures, lending new shapes to bodies and objects. The human body becomes a geometric box on a pedestal in Color of Me (2013), a Photoshopped collage of the artist’s own wrinkles and pores. Her body is reduced to the dysmorphic state of the prostrate figure in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés (1946-1966). De Joode employs a similarly hued kneaded terracotta clay, whose contours likewise resemble the lumps and crannies of the human body that mark its surface. Rather than exhibit the clay itself, de Joode’s clay only becomes sculpture in photographs of clay-marked shapes, or on photographic prints on fabric draped over live human models. Her work is at once photograph, sculpture, photograph of sculpture and performance. Objects perform elsewhere, as in Life Is Very Long (2012) where 60 frozen pizzas slowly defrost (and collapse) over the course of the exhibition. In “The New Beauty Of Our Modern Life,” a group show at Higher Pictures, New York, the artist maps the trajectory of the dripping tear in photorealist sculpture. De Joode’s work is also currently on view in “Surface Poetry,” a group show at Gallery Boetzelaer|Nispen, Amsterdam, and in “The Molten Inner Core,” a solo show at Gallery Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin. (Simone Krug)

Lucy Kim is an artist who plays games with images. The Korean-born and Massachusetts-based artist subjects referents of pop culture to forms of visual distortion. Likening her practice to a type of analogue Photoshop, she processes appropriated imagery with a keen sense of materiality, exploring how visual perception can be confounded. She often works against the latent qualities of a medium, and one can look towards the work Parrot Figurines (2013) as typical. Incorporating oil paint, aluminium foil and plastic, the almost sculptural treatment of the surface interferes with the viewer’s ability to easily decipher the image. The creased surface dramatizes the relationship between what is represented and how it is made. Continuing with the bird motif, Kim has cast sculptures of parrots and ducks with latex, then painted and stretched the elasticated castings over stretcher bars. The resultant warping and pictorial repetitions act to camouflage the originating source to point of increasing abstraction. Viewers are asked to see two things simultaneously in Kim’s work: method and content, while process and representation work against each other to disorient them. It is these formal slippages that create the compelling effect of a slapstick dysfunction. Kim has recently become represented by the New York gallery Lisa Cooley, who will be hosting her first solo exhibition in 2015. (George Vasey)

Olga Balema’s work investigates the fragility of matter and its contamination by forms of digital and technological production, which underlines the instability and displacement of its physical presence. The immateriality of this process of translation is questioned through the evidence of organic feelings in everyday objects. Balema’s recent solo show at Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam features extended latex arms that sag unnaturally in the gallery space. As inorganic surrogates, their bodily alienation is subjected to a state of tension between animate and inanimate, human and inhuman. Balema (Ukraine, 1984) often uses industrial products in her work: leggings and t-shirts with decorative prints of mistranslated texts become sculptural presences, rusty steel chunks and fragmented buckets are reassembled into fountains. Language is altered for decorative purpose with reference to pop culture and its modification in social networks. The rust in the fountains changes the color of the water and the status of the printed textiles soaked in it. Their texts, already corrupted in meaning, are also destined for physical deterioration. The transformative states of matter and its impermanence is also central in the sculptures presented at 1646 in Den Haag and at The approach in London. Check out Balema’s works in her current and upcoming group shows: “Material Memory” at Fluxia, Milan, from January 23-March 8; “Apples and Pears” at DREI, Cologne, from January 24-March 8; and “Geographies of Contamination” at DRAF, London, from January 31-March 29. (Guido Santandrea)

In Dutch artist Martijn Hendriks’ work there consistently seems to be more than meets the eye. In a piece entitled Sixth (2012), what appears to be a simple black and white abstract rendering is actually a pigment print featuring a digitally reconfigured sculpture enclosed in a maple frame. In a more recent artwork, Weekend (2013), diverse materials like money, newspapers and a USB key containing Google image search results are hidden in a plastic bag hunged on two minimal, pallid shapes leaning against the wall. His latest one-man show at WCW Gallery in Hamburg follows Hendriks’ habit of demanding that the audience investigate what’s beyond his aesthetically pleasing objects. The exhibition looks like a nearly empty storage room with scattered works composed by whiteboards, backpacks, cupholders, travel bags, hoodies, dried glass noodles and more. These conservative arrangements almost seem like an individual has placed them there as markers for later sculptures. The objects derive from texts about corporate processes for Initial Public Offerings, referenced from the web and repeatedly translated via Google Translate. The resulting gibberish is adapted into the myriad objects place within the gallery. The artist indeed explores how sculpture manages to circulate and reproduce through populations of images, forming new bonds and strategic alliances as its environment changes. On February 15, don’t miss Hendriks’ participation with Francesco Stocchi in “Impossible Show” at Temporary Gallery, Cologne. (James Shaeffer)

For British-born artist Than Hussein Clark, the tradition of design and applied arts is sprinkled with objects belonging to queer modes of production, collection and presentation relegated outside given areas of taste or sociocultural environments. “I am interested in objects which are counter-memory,” says the artist, “meaning that I am looking to harness the ways in which an object might not preserve narratives but, by the overloading of surfaces and symbolic registers, produce a kind of cancellation.” Clark opened his very first solo show at Mathew Gallery, Berlin, last September. Titled “Waves (Das Glucklicher Rothschild),” the exhibition included a number of furnishings, such as carpets, glassworks and ceramic pieces, in order to question the ambivalent role of theatre and architecture, the way their mutual functioning develops into complex scenarios—as it happens in domestic interiors, for example. “I have a deep aversion to the notion of the interior as a familial node, and have continually worked to articulate the way in which the interior has played refuge for subjectivities cut off from public life,” states Clark. In 2014 the artist will present a solo show opening at WCW Gallery, Hamburg, and, as part of Villa Design Group, a performance project to be presented at the Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies, London. (Michele D’Aurizio)