Auxier Kline is pleased to present our third solo exhibition by the artist Hank Ehrenfried, Flight Spiral.

Hank Ehrenfried’s process begins with the assemblage of collages made from old auction catalogs, internet garbage, erotica, instructional guides, museum catalogs, and other assorted imagery. Materials are cut, folded and stuck back together to make haphazard compositions that force histories and images together unexpectedly. These collages are then affixed to the walls of his studio and painted from life as trompe l’oeil. But Ehrenfried’s approach is not photorealistic. Imagery goes in and out of focus. His loyalty is not to ‘how it was,’ but instead to the power of observation to engender affect. With their false shadows, the mock sheen of their glossy pages, the imitation paint splatters and faux nail holes on the walls behind, the paintings alert us to the fact that what we behold in them is missing, is past. The paintings themselves do not admit ownership of this imagery and their origins, only the plain observation of their time stuck to a studio wall. And as records of these ephemeral appearances, they prime us to expect the return of these figures some day, somewhere.

Nearly all of these the paintings contain pictures of wings, an image Ehrenfried finds resonant with several aspects of his way of making. Their reminder of the flighty weightlessness of birds recalls the ephemerality of his collage materials. Their suggestion of the biological specimen pinned to a board for study rhymes disturbingly with the fastening of paper structures to the studio wall. And their symbolic weight prompts reflection on the difference between the real and the poetic and to consider what distinguishes the real collages from their aesthetic representation in the paintings. Most of all though, these wings evoke angels, who are also ephemeral, bound, and symbolic creatures. In particular, Ehrenfried’s fixation has been Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the “Angel of History,” who is blown backwards into the future by a tempest wind, the growing mess of present progress. The wings in these new paintings, like those of Benjamin’s angel, cannot entirely overcome the forces that threaten to reduce them to history’s rubble. But by bearing witness to their precarity (as Benjamin says of his angel), we can be their redeemer.