‘I am the curator of my own misery,” reads a 2010 text by Douglas Gordon. Originally drawn in ballpoint pen direct on a gallery wall, it has now been carefully rendered in a small oil painting by Buenos Aires painter Laura Ojeda Bär. She hasn’t only painted the text, but also the wall it has been written on. Gordon’s pungent text has implications, and so too do the other artworks, from Tate and other British collections, which Bär has painted and ranged around the terracotta-coloured adobe-plastered walls of an installation created by the Argentinian sculptor Gabriel Chaile. Among them are Phillip King’s daft 1963 sculpture Tra-La-La, an Alexander Calder mobile, a dangling Louise Bourgeois figure, Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the interior of a hot-water bottle, an Easter Island head, a set of Dan Flavin neon tubes and an image of the Townley Diskobolos, a classical Greek sculpture in the British Museum collection. These muted, precise paintings are at odds with the way they’re presented here.
Grouped as little conversations around the gallery and sometimes hung askew, Bär’s paintings argue among themselves. They jostle at odd, out-of-whack angles. One canvas tilts on the wall like a drunk, but the image on its surface maintains its poise and equilibrium, perfectly aligned to the horizontal and vertical. Usos y Costumbres, which translates as “customs and habits”, wrongfoots us at every turn. Everything, it seems, is unstable.
