“A sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication make up the humdrum backdrop against which our ideals and euphorias often stand out, unless they be that fleeting clear-mindedness shredding the amorous hypnosis that joins two persons together.” – Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Bathroom Stories, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Finnish artist Marianna Uutinen. This will be her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Uutinen’s approach to painting is about materiality and space. Thick layers of acrylic paint are draped across the surface of the canvas to build up a skin-like surface in a non-linear process. Each overlaying gesture negates, blends, and reveals the accumulation of her actions, creating a performative arena in which both a painter and her materials act and react. In her new works, layers of glitter and acrylic paint yield shimmering surfaces that resemble interstellar nebula. Yet Uutinen does not concern herself with the romantic of nature, but rather with proposing a new form of nature. Her recent paintings reveal the dynamism of their materials. Color functions as a non-space, a khôra, which rests between the sensible and intelligible: a space through which everything passes. Constantly shifting and revealing new facets of the work and spaces to enter it, Marianna Uutinen’s recent paintings reveal the animation of matter, proposing a life form through material that reflects melancholia, sex, and death—but also radiant beauty and hope, escapism and banality. If her earlier neon works were like a shout, the subdued palette of her recent paintings are closer to a seething whisper: softly spoken stories about flesh and the stars that take place somewhere between the cosmos and the bathroom floor.