The artist’s never-ending remix of references comes through as a refreshingly joyful and non-individualistic take on artmaking
‘“Nothing is interesting, nothing is sexy, nothing is not embarrassing.”’ This Andy Warhol quotation is centred in the middle of a glossy pinkish sheet, rip-marks to one side suggesting it might be a page torn from a magazine. A window is cut out below the text revealing white paper, which is itself cut like a frame-mount around a printed video-still of a blocky CGI character against a bright green background, and captioned with a subtitle reading: ‘Oh cool it’s XXI century art’. Though the blonde Playmobile-like figure is not looking straight at the quotation below which he has been embedded, it’s clear that this is what he is reacting to, like a comic-book figure breaking the fourth wall by engaging with the world outside of its panels. And in the more meta sense, which is what multimedia artist Marijn van Kreij seems to be getting at, it’s as if the artwork is breaking the fourth wall and commenting on the ways in which we might come to see it, read it, understand it. A frame within a frame within a frame humorously tackling the blasé attitude put on by some contemporary art snobs.
Art-historical context is not strictly necessary to read this image, but if you’d like some, you can get it from the title: Untitled (Andy Warhol, Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011) (2021); the former artist being one of the early proponents of the appropriation of mass-produced images; the latter the one behind the video from which the still is taken (My Best Thing, 2011) and a thinker on self-referentiality and the interplays of image, language and meaning. Together, they form a solid pair of references for the 11 works brought together in this small exhibition, all works on paper except for one short, looped video. Each of them cuts, pastes, replicates and rearranges found text and imagery from Modern and contemporary Western art history, literature and pop culture into compositions that can be equally apprehended on a surface level (through playful text-image encounters) or send you as deep as you’d like down a cultural rabbit-hole (through aforementioned found media, generously referenced in each artwork title). Some are collages, others handmade drawings or paintings, and some are a mix of both, like a printed-out scan of a book page largely whited-out then re-illustrated by hand with what we can only assume – from the caption which has been left visible – is a reproduction of the original drawing (Untitled (Sturtevant, Krazy Kat, 1987), 2026).
This never-ending remix of references taken from Pop art, Suprematism, Bauhaus, Arte povera – you name it – comes through as a refreshingly joyful and non-individualistic take on artmaking that excitedly fawns over its own history. One collage, half of a diptych, displays a quotation from artist Richard Tuttle beneath an unevenly cut piece of purple card from which a yellow strip sticks out like an index tab (Untitled (Richard Tuttle, David Berman, Free Myself from Myself, The Robot, II), 2015/2023). In the largescale Untitled (Edward Koren, Living Together, 1977) (2025), a distinctly handmade reproduction of a Newsweek cover that gives its title to the exhibition, van Kreij leaves his preliminary pencil sketch visible below the overlapping distilled gouache brush-marks. The whole thing, painted on paper and pinned to the wall, has a crafty quality to it. In fact, the paper in nearly all the works is charmingly creased, ripped or stained. What transpires is a genuine sense of enthusiasm that will leave you thinking that it might be cool to like XXI-century art after all.
Marijn van Kreij, Living Together is on view at Pale Horse, London, through 18 July
