In New York, the fever for building is at a heightened pitch, and seems to be infecting activity in the art world as well. For his first U.S. solo show, for example, Hamburg-based artist Stefan Kern (b. 1966) has set aside the minimalist-inflected, hyper-fine furniture for which he is known and filled Andrew Kreps Gallery with gleaming approximations of construction-site detritus.
Collectively titled Missed the Turn, the four works in the installation (priced between $18,000 and $24,000) add up to a messy but spare arrangement of dented sidewalk barricades, billowing blue tarps, and bright orange barrier tape -- fabricated, machismo matter made decadent by the feminine finish the artist applies ubiquitously.
This is punch-line art, to be sure, but like a good punch line it resonates for days. At first these things promise to be available for recognition, like regular old objects, but under examination they recede from reality into a plane of pure Platonic ideals. The work is impossibly bright, hard and seductive; the closer you look, the weirder it looks.