Susan Hamburger

Asya Geisberg Gallery is excited to announce “Near Enemies,” Susan Hamburger’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show pairs medieval-style banners hung on the wall, inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s armory collection, and invented helmets made of papier mâché and paper clay. The artist works within the history of Western European decorative arts with its hyper-feminine association, to re-imagine the chivalrous, performative function of these highly embellished artifacts of military glory. Her delicate sculptures, ever more baroque yet equally preposterous, are in turn utterly useless to protect or even intimidate. The overall exhibition can be read as both an admiring re-engagement with seemingly antiquated decorative traditions, and an excoriation: the ludicrousness of glamorizing the savagery of war and empire building.

Hamburger has long worked with current events and history as her subject, and in this current series, begun after prolonged museum visits during the pandemic, she has zoomed out to war's symbolic elevation into parades, ornamented armor, or sartorial embellishments. The artist’s paintings dote on heraldic banners, used in processions and pageantry, adding regalia such as tassels, sewn golden borders, and hanging each banner on a rod. In tarnished hues of greens and blues, the helmets are romanticized, as a wistful idea of long-gone empire and hierarchical mono-culture. Included on the edges of the painted banners are decorative herbs with dual properties: poisonous, or choking out native species - beautiful but with a dark connotation - or “near enemies.” Finally, meaningless banners at the bottom of each work wink at the hollow empty promises of proclamations of power. Everywhere the relationship between meaning and its form is critiqued, subverted, or denied.

The sculptures push the frivolity and decorative excess into absurdity - adding yet more animal, floral, or fantastical elements. Stripped of color and placed on pedestals, they promise pomp, within a painted architectural installation meant to evoke a royal past. Instead of the anonymity of most historical craftsmanship, with twenty-first century eyes we are meant to consider who is making the artwork, and who is missing from the conversation, whose power these objects could be sanctifying, and which standards the standard-bearers are parading.

The exhibition’s oxymoronic title operates on many levels. A hint at frenemies, or keeping one’s enemy closer. "Near Enemies" is also a Buddhist concept borrowed by psychotherapy, establishing four desired virtues and their corresponding near enemies that masquerade as each virtue, such as the virtue compassion and its enemy: pity. Hamburger has a history of working in one material to mimic another, manipulating a common material such as paper to emulate a more refined material such as porcelain. Akin to a covert operator - Hamburger places herself within a long tradition of content camouflaged in the “merely" decorative. In a moment when we are told that enemies are everywhere, the show is a potent reminder of the visual glory and perils of excess.