Catherine Fookes’s Exhibition HANDMADE

The painter as material torturer: Catherine Fookes throws stuff at her paintings and sees what sticks. Then she rips it off again. Paint and repeat, painfully, until layer upon layer become palimpsest, process becomes product; this is painting gone maximalist, jutting out of the frames. Yet this aggressive practice results in constructed, deliberate composition; this is no hoarder’s bedroom. Where Robert Rauschenberg brought social commentary to pop, Fookes brings scary kitsch to a post-painterly abstraction: tinsel, love hearts, phallic shapes, poker chips. Absent shells leave glue scabs in their wake. A high-brow, low-brow, rigorous mash-up to send shivers down Frank Stella’s spine.