Sticky
Kanthierine Aungier, Pat Boas, Agatha Jaquiss, Rebecca Shippee
February 7th - March 15th, 2026
Artist talk ~ March 8th, 2-4pm

Press Release
Painting should be something you can smell. Calling for catastrophe, painting relies on digging an image out of the mud by
any means necessary; through time, movement, creation and alchemy. Painting as both noun and verb. Out of a sticky mess
not through heroics, labor or excess effort, but out of refutation of passivity. After all, when starting a painting you start
with the beginning of the world, creating the egg.

Within the unpainted is the clutter of every possible image, every stupid idea, and every good idea that ultimately becomes
stupid. The start of the painting is the process of restructuring; smearing and scratching leads to breakthroughs, but also to
greater errors that require rearrangement. Painting is visual image making and the artist is responsible to kill the clichéd
image, as the fight against cliché is the fight against narrative, the fight against reference. Painting has nothing to show and
nothing to tell. T o tell something is to choose another discipline. That is the unsolvable problem in painting, showing the
invisible.

Where do we situate ourselves? Perhaps finally emerging from a post 2018-ish figurative hell on earth with; embracing
droopy arms, Y ale MFA painting programs, Gofundmes, web stores and an overemphasis on peripheral factors leading to a
flattening of painting into a photographic practice, where the contemproaryartdaily.com documentation carries more
significance than the painting itself. Post 2020, many galleries shifted to a sales strategy that emphasized ‘
online viewing rooms. Digital spaces where painting can be viewed through pixelated misinterpretations – shipping and storing is
expensive after all. One starts to wonder if the whole idea of art shows might become obsolete in the next 10 years, as
galleries join the accelerated death of third spaces, where anyone can walk in without having to make a purchase. Openings
are functioning like public memorials, with open caskets.

This never-ending flattening through image circulation leads to painterly paranoia, where one tries to paint things that are
not paintings, but substitutes for web based graphic material. Something that can be scaled down to thumbnails. In
opposition to the theories of network based painting, it is important to state that painting is undecidedly not beside itself.
Paintings have the potential to be truth protruding one and half inch from the wall, they are themselves. Abstracted
methods of being translated from a willingness to make something real. Painting is the language.

But most painting is obviously terrible. Galleries are shutting down – thank god. Art must be scaled down, Less artists
please, except for me of course.

Jens Petersen
Berlin, February 2026