Man’s best friend, an aristocratic lady’s favorite accessory, a hunter’s most invaluable companion, a child’s protector and playmate—dogs are richly scattered throughout European art history, and have oftentimes received the same artistic care as the painting’s human subjects, their owners. Think of Paolo Veronese’s Boy with a Greyhound (1570), in which the latter’s alertness and athleticism matches that of the polished young nobleman beside him, or Anthony van Dyck’s towering mastiff and devoted Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in his portrait of the Five Eldest Children of Charles I (1637). Over time, dogs have stepped out of the shadow of man, and woman, and would incre singly appear in artworks on their own merit. The output of canine portraits has ever increased over time, until it became a veritable deluge in the Victorian era. As to the 20th century, many artists immortalized their own much cherished pets in their respective artistic style: Franz Marc’s portrait of his Siberian sheepdog Russi (Dog lying in the snow, 1911) or David Hockney’s numerous renderings of his Dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie (Dog days, 1995) are testament to that.
It is worth mentioning that over the centuries, many of the most distinguished and financially successful animal portraitists have been women. The genre was deemed suitable for them, as it was considered harmless and relatively simple. In the current presentation, Julia Scher and Sandra Slim, however, creatively and masterfully showcase that the inclusion of animals, and dogs in particular, into their respective artistic realm only adds to their art work’s ability to negotiate some of the most captivating and complex questions of our time.
For over three decades, Julia Scher has been creating works which have subverted and upended security systems designed to control both public and private space, and questioning the systems and structures of identity and society, long before our era of reality TV, digital contact-tracing and unwittingly becoming the subject of a video that has gone viral on social media. Greta (2022), her marble sculpture of a greyhound, is not only one of the pioneer inhabitants of Scher’s selfconceived Planet Greyhound, but also the namesake of the largest long-distance bus company in the US. Its services are crucial to transporting newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States. Greta is seemingly glued to an info screen at a bus station, as the video’s title informs us, and attentively observes some of her ‘peers’ navigating an intergalactic transit area. The ‘watchdog’ in this casearguably serves as our avatar, and it is precisely the animalistic ‘Verfremdungseffekt,’ virtuously employed by Scher, which prompts us to engage in questions of gaze and (gendered?) viewership, of compassion and empathy, and of daring to envision an escapist, more equitable utopia.
The four-legged inhabitants of the painterly world of Sandra Slim are certainly no stranger to a good time. So much so that we are quick to overlook the creeping sense of unease stemming from an overarching Big Brother style eye, or simply from being unable to occupy oneself without relying on screens (Everybody knows once you have a pool you never use it, 2022). Slim’s artistic style echoes ‘primitive’ paintings as well as elements of Pop Art, creating a distinct visual language, rich with humor, melancholy and astute observations of our surroundings.
—Dina Kagan, 2023
at Jo Van De Loo, Munich
until October 27, 2023