COVID-19
What’s black and white and red all over? The sculptures, paintings and drawings of Sarah Krepp, including the entirety of her recent solo exhibition at Governors State University in Illinois. Closed before it even opened, tatting - - tearing featured examples of the veteran artist’s signature work, as vigorous and overwhelming as ever. Deconstructed tires, flayed and woven, burst from an exploding panel of hefty orange and crimson marks, tangle into an impenetrable wall of rusty spikes, and crash in a fiery spiral of old rubber and metal. Enormous compositions in oil and acrylic fill to capacity with simple, muscular gestures that sit uneasily atop dense grounds of words, snatches of NPR-speak the artist scribbles down as she paints, as indecipherable as the 24/7 news cycle. The overall effect of Krepp’s show is of endless distraction, mass confusion and bloody road wrecks, a dismal but verifiable portrait of America in its waning years. That is what’s black and white and red all over: this country, awash in black death, white noise and so much blood.
—Lori Waxman 2020-08-19 8:54 PM