An exploration of vanity and decay

Los Angeles

ON a visit last month to Kaari Upson's studio here, it looked as if she had just left to grab a cup of coffee or maybe one of the "garbage burritos" she loved so much. Her art was everywhere: new paintings and drawings covering the walls, with recent sculptures of tree trunks hanging from the ceiling.

Outside, on the back patio, was a used mattress - one of her favorite objects for casting in silicone because of its associations with trash, sex and sickbeds. Her pick-up truck, a gray Toyota Tundra, was still parked in back. The whiteboard on the wall still had to-do notes in her handwriting.

The artist, known for making smart, darkly obsessive sculptures, videos and drawings that capture the stubborn pathologies of family trauma and American hedonism, had last stepped foot in the space in June 2021 before flying to New York to see her doctor at Sloan Kettering. There she discovered that her breast cancer, already metastatic, had advanced. In August, after a 9-year battle with cancer, she died in the hospital at age 51, leaving behind a teenage daughter, Esmé Rudell.

She also left behind a surprising amount of new work, created during the pandemic. Five series were at various stages of completion, from dozens of lumpy, slogan-bearing ceramic cups, made from a mould of a furball from her cat Bandit, to a set of brilliantly coloured, elusively rendered resin-based portraits that will debut at the Venice Biennale in April as part of Cecilia Alemani's group show, The Milk of Dreams.

The gallery representing her estate, Sprüth Magers, is also planning to show a selection of new work in its Los Angeles branch Aug 6 through Oct 8.

"At some level, I think she knew she was going to die and wanted to make as much work as she could for Esmé before she did," said Ali Subotnick, who curated her earliest museum shows, at the Hammer Museum in 2007 and 2009. "She always worked furiously. Even watching the Real Housewives, which was work for her because it was research, she was always drawing."

The vivid, sometimes lurid, resin paintings heading to Venice test the integrity of the human body. In the series, called Portrait (Vain German) with a nod to her German-born mother, the faces shown are swollen, fragmented or disfigured. Upson started them a few months before her mother's death from melanoma in April 2020 and made 40 in all, including some with clock faces instead of human ones, before she too ran out of time. Ten will appear in Venice.

But if these portraits reference her mother, this is also self-portraiture of the most probing and unforgiving kind, with sad clown-like faces, startling skeletal grins and bulging cartoony eyeballs, done in strident colours like mustard and magenta.

Born in San Bernardino, California, in 1970, Upson grew up with a sense of encroaching violence, "not just crime but natural violence - there's a lot of fires, windstorms, mudslides," she once told The New York Times critic Jason Farago in Even magazine.

Her career took off while she was in graduate school at CalArts with a highly obsessive investigation into the life of a stranger, a playboy neighbour of her parents known as "Larry". She either discovered or stole his diaries and other mementos, depending on when you asked her, and, from 2005 to 2011, mined them for paintings, videos and more.

The Larry Project quickly brought her critical attention - and comparisons to French privacy-invading artist Sophie Calle. But her interest in exposing the seamy underbelly of California dreaming put her firmly in the abject and uncanny territory of artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, and she went on to gain acclaim for making silicone and urethane casts of used, sometimes soiled, domestic objects like mattresses.

With the Vain German work, she returned to painting and turned even more directly toward the vulnerability of the human body. Some teeth are cracked or missing; some heads don't have hair.

Margot Norton, who curated her 2017 survey at the New Museum, said she found the new series "incredibly brave". She compared it to "a calendar where different portraits capture fleeting moments or moods. Some are really tortured and some are lighter. I have this feeling she was marking time".

The centrepiece at the New Museum show was a dizzying Costco-sized display of dummies showing the artist wearing her mother's plaid shirt and bluejeans.

A disturbing new sculpture in the studio also plumbs family dysfunction, showing Upson dressed as her mother, stabbed in the back with bottles of Smirnoff vodka, her father's favourite brand.

While he was raised in San Bernardino, the artist's mother was born in Chemnitz, Germany, during World War II and emigrated to California in her 20s.

Subotnick believes that Upson grew especially curious about her maternal roots after travelling to Germany in 2019. "Kaari was obsessed with her mom's obsession with TV documentaries on German history, Nazis and Jews. She was trying to get to know her mom," Subotnick explained.

"But the more I think about her work and go through the archives, the notes and drawings, I think she was always trying to figure out who she was by merging her identity with these important figures in her life," the curator added, comparing the new work to her so-called "kiss paintings" from The Larry Project, where she smashed portraits of her face and his together, canvases still wet, to fuse - or obliterate - their identities. NYTIMES