In its eschewing of art technique and history, Of my life at Kunsthalle Basel catches a certain artworld mood
The works in American artist Ser Serpas’s solo show offer different approaches to disintegration: painted images not quite formed or effaced; objects as leftovers of activity that happened somewhere else, at some other time. Bookending the display, in the first and last of the Kunsthalle’s grand, parquet-floored, high-ceilinged galleries, are suites of big, gloomy, battered paintings (all untitled; all 2025), on unstretched canvases fixed directly to the wall. Smudged and scuffed, these mostly depict hazily faceless human bodies, some reclining, some lying flat, others painted like totems, hemmed in by the edges of their canvas, or seen from above, like mortuary shots, or X-rays.
Notes tell us that these 20 canvases were made by pressing one canvas over a freshly painted one, the transfer of paint producing a reversed version of the image on the other canvas, a process that perhaps accounts for the flattened, smeared style of the resulting paintings. For sure, if you shuttle between the two spaces with this in mind, you might notice canvases that are, roughly, mirror images of another – in one couple, a dirty pinkish figure with one arm truncated, the other overlong, sprawls awkwardly in indeterminate brown-grey shadows. But to make this transit between the two galleries, you have to go through three spaces occupied by quite different works – the leftovers of the material props for three restagings of performances first put on during the 1990s by the Georgian group Margo Korableva Performance Theatre (MKPT), who Serpas got to know when living itinerantly in Georgia. Monitors presenting degraded videos of the original performances are situated among the materials of Serpas’s remakes; on the monitor for Kitchen Drama (1993/2025), for example, we see the group’s founder, David Chikhladze, fiddling on a floor filled with kitchen utensils and dry ingredients with straight-faced absurdism – pouring cutlery into colanders, miking up electric whisks to generate cacophonies, as a puzzled public watches on. In another (Kali Yuga Hysteria, 1997), the group stride around on an elevated platform, as they take it in turns to pick up and dance jerkily with a bass drum, while tentatively striking it with a drumstick, as if unsure of what they’re ‘supposed’ to be doing.
By interrupting hers with another artist’s work (the rooms dedicated to MKPT become like a hinge around which the symmetry of the two rooms of painting turns), Serpas has sidestepped the orthodox form of a solo show and, pointedly, not filled the place with the kind of improvised, symbolically charged sculptures, scavenged from street junk, for which she has become known. There are definitely affinities between MKPT’s activity and Serpas’s own: a loose anarchism of materials and techniques, a deliberate interruption of artistic conventions that are supposed to define their respective genres: Serpas’s paintings are stubbornly resistant to the conventions of representation; MKPT is constantly highlighting and subverting the conventions of theatrics. And yet there’s a generational and historical gulf at which point they diverge in attitude and tone – while MKPT’s antics carry a satirical sensibility to the gestures and social symbols they hijack, Serpas’s bleak, dissolving, vaguely morbid bodies recede into a caricatured abjection. And, given their distinct approaches, one wonders why this was not presented as a collaborative double-bill rather than a solo show.
Performance art doesn’t lend itself to permanence, of course, it slips through the mesh of the archive and art-historical memory. So there’s always value in seeing things remade live (Serpas and the group have programmed a series of these performances during the show’s run). The paintings, by contrast, aspire to a sort of artistic grandiosity despite themselves: in their smudging of the genre tradition of the nude, in their fuzzing-out of the human body’s particularity and individuality, hemmed around by the process of mirroring and duplication, but portentous of their own imminent decay and disappearance. Furthermore, the exhibition’s title, Of my life, suggests either an assertion of subjective honesty or, conversely, a distanced, analytical objectivity. In its deliberate ‘artlessness’ – its eschewing of art technique and history for a performed rawness and unskilled immediacy, along with the callout to collaboration and club-night-ish performance, Serpas’s show catches a certain artworld mood: that while collectors might want the certainty and security of paintings in art galleries, artists would rather be making art anywhere else.
Of my life at Kunsthalle Basel, through 21 September
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
