Maren Karlson: LAG | Soft Opening
I’d seen, and really liked, the German painter Maren Karlson’s “rough, depressing oils” at this gallery in 2024. At that show, she portrayed distorted versions of photos of a factory. I can’t tell what she’s portraying at this latest Soft Opening show, just that - according to the press release - it relates to Ulrike Meinhof and her 70s-vintage Red Army Faction.
Karlson’s works are hostile. Not only is it hard to make out the black and white shapes, perhaps of buildings and streets, in their form… you also need to squat down to the ground to get any closer look at them. They’re a few inches off the gallery floor. I researched later, and found that they’re based on photos of buildings targeted by Meinhof and her gang - before she hung herself in her prison cell.
Perhaps this hostility, this witholding from the viewer, is defensive on Karlson’s part. Because by engaging with Meinhof, she engages with Gerhard Richter too, and his famous 1988 cycle of paintings related to her and her gang.
He included one of Meinhof’s death which physically shocked me when I saw it in Richter’s huge 2025 Paris retrospective. Nothing Karlson does here touches that, nor should we expect her to. But she does leave herself open to charges of evasiveness, given the physical difficulty of viewing these new works, and our difficulty in making out what we see. Richter never lends his viewer that form of escape.
Maren Karlson: LAG is at Soft Opening (London). 11 September - 17 October 2026