God's Little Soldiers
From Titian to Richter
Icon: Sayre Gomez
It’s really fun watching how artists of a certain generation see their practices twist and morph as they become parents (or choose not to become parents themselves but see children enter their lives otherwise). Sayre’s work is best known for a neo-photorealist pathos of the southern Californian urban landscape, the stuff of strip malls and telephone poles and road signs and graffiti, so I was struck by this incoherently adorable pair of sculptures. He explains to Artnews:
My son just turned six, and my daughter will be five in May. I made sculptures of both of them; they’re sit up in the rafters. They’re based on those Precious Moments collectible figurines that I feel like my grandma had when I was a kid. The Precious Moments brand is very openly Christian, which I don’t like, but I’ve also noticed that a lot of different subcultures have appropriated Precious Moments. They’re interesting as blank frames of reference in that way: they’re not recognizable like Disney characters or something, but they do have this familiarity… and some anonymity, too.
I called them Soldier 1 and Soldier 2 (both 2025) because I feel like they’re these figures who are just starting to get their awareness and become outfitted for the world in a way.
In the pre-show press material you get to see them up close, while, in the exhibition on view now at David Kordansky in LA, these two little Soldiers are seated next to each other on a rafter beneath the vaulted gray timber ceiling. Having children doesn’t just mean you suddenly have little people in your world to depict, though that’s certainly part of it. The bigger change is that they open up new points of view, particularly new angles of wonder; a little layer of the sublime that furtively rests over the dust of everything. Some of Sayre’s trademark paintings are trompe l’oeil doors and windows with stickers peeling off of them, so the patches on these garments seem like part and parcel of the practice.
Field: Trip: “Kids! Between Representation and Reality”
This is one of those exhibitions that contains so much of everything that it doesn’t end up as much of anything: children in art, from Titian to Richter. Children as theme is somewhat antithetical to the way I want to think of the relationship between art and family: inaccessible to children, barely interesting to parents, facile to the specialist. It’s hard to imagine what the impetus was for this project, other than a generically easy theme to bring together some loans:
Link: “Meet the Swiss Artist-Publisher Making Children’s Books with Artists like Rachel Harrison and Martin Parr” in Artnews
This is a great profile of Camillo Paravicini, whose Rookie Books imprint is making publications for children with artists like Michaela Eichwald and Monster Chetwynd. I’m obsessed.
