Bodily Imaginaries: Albert Herter, Caitlin Keogh, and Candice Lin

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce Bodily Imaginaries, a group exhibition of works on paper by artists Albert Herter, Caitlin Keogh, and Candice Lin that presents divergent aesthetic approaches that reference discrete histories.

The provocative antiheroes of Candice Lin’s drawings confront colonial fears and fantasies head-on. Her pseudo historical etchings and watercolors, rendered in the style of a 19th-century imperialist travelogue, offer hyperbolically racialized caricatures who defy the safe bounds of control. Lin’s narrative revisits a complex portrait of the eroticism, the conquest, and the ritual that were often loathed in an Occidental self and projected onto ‘the other’.

Entirely constructed, mechanically hinged, and ghoulishly costumed, Albert Herter’s bodies resemble composite marionettes incapable of grasping their own strings. His intricately drafted, restless subjects are social creatures, whose forms are simultaneously familiar and foreign, artificial and expressive. In Herter’s Instauration and Aggressive Constellation series, individual and social trials, interconnected by chaos, are on full display.

In her drawings of anonymous female torsos, Caitlin Keogh employs visual dislocation, interruption, and isolation of bodies in visual space. Keogh’s subjects, decapitated and limbless, are imbued with ideal proportions, but clinically so. Dissociated bodies are often eviscerated, bound, punctured or penetrated by foreign objects, vegetal outgrowths, or decorative patterns. Keogh contaminates a Pop vocabulary of flatness, outline, and graphic precision with sensuality, undulation, exuberance, and the animate.

Bodily Imaginaries prioritizes repellant, disjointed, or incomplete figures that subvert established representations of official narratives, Vitruvian bodies, and sanctioned desires.