Jakub Julian Ziolkowski at Hauser & Wirth NY reviewed by ARTFORUM

‘Up yours’ seems to be the whole nihilistic, pessimistic, sardonic, stick-it-to-you point of Ziolkowski’s paintings. ‘Untitled (Into the Hole)’ makes this unequivocally clear: The whole world is draining into an abyss – a black asshole. A cartoony Raft of the Medusa appears in the picture, with a priest – he looks as though he stepped out of a George Grosz caricature – as a sort of prow, suggesting that it is a ship of fools.

There are in fact numerous art-historical quotations in Ziolkowski’s works: ‘Untitled (OMABO),’ for instance, features a mockingly slapdash take on Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes; in an untitled allover painting, the signature eyes become polka dot–like gestures; the existentially serious ‘The Clash’ is based on Goya’s ‘Fight with Cudgels’ – a painting in which two figures battle to the death while standing knee-deep in the quicksand (rendered as shit) in which both will drown.

Indeed, on one level Ziolkowski’s work seems like a wide-ranging parodic reprise of modernist ideas, as the paintings’ surrealistic figuration and expressionistic energy indicate. Both tendencies are brilliantly integrated – scrambled? – in Caligula. The flamboyant weirdness, not to mention sensationalist candor, with which Ziolkowski wields modernist staples suggests that he thinks they are the best way to revivify age-old themes: the triumph of death, as conveyed by his various skeletons, some a discombobulated collection of dancing bones; and the triumph of human folly, evident in ‘Priceless Arse,’ a rendering of a bent-over man who shits gold coins.

Indeed, scatology tends to serve a critical purpose in Ziolkowski’s works. His scathing comic morbidity is oddly refreshing, perhaps because it breathes new life into modern-type art and into the theme of death. But he can also be very unfunny. See, for example, the agonized face in ‘Untitled’ – its mouth open in death or a scream, its eyes covered in coins. Many of Ziolkowski’s paintings have a posterlike blatancy; one four-part suite, ‘Galoty (Posters # 1–4),’ comprises explicit poster paintings.

A rendering of a skeleton photographer – an attack on photography by a painter – is also blunt and outspoken. But, as ‘Milk & Honey’ shows, Ziolkowski can also be coy and insinuating. Overall, the artist’s work seems heavily dependent on German art – on Hans Baldung Grien’s death imagery, Neue Sachlichkeit’s sense of social absurdity, and German neo-expressionist black humor – in its vision of the human condition. An unholy and disturbingly deranged face in Untitled (King of Israel) suggests the unsettling complexity of Ziolkowski’s mentality. Whatever its ideological implications – and however it caters to controversy – it is a fine, surreally expressionistic painting that might be an alternative self-portrait to Timothy Galoty, if as barbaric.