Ebecho Muslimova Taught Herself To Flip In

Not ready to give up on purposeful unseriousness, derangement, and grotesque just yet, I wanted to share a few impressions of Ebecho Muslimova’s London debut, Flip In. On view at Bernheim Gallery until the end of the month, the exhibition brings a new series of mind-warping paintings, previously unseen textile works, and a wallpaper installation that carries the stories off the canvas and onto the gallery walls.

For years I’ve been a fan of Muslimova’s mind, attitude, and her work, but it was after seeing her solo presentation with the same gallery in Basel that I got to fully appreciate these paintings. What hits you first is how crisp and graphic these images are. They’re regularly dominated by line-drawn characters: Fatebe, a Betty Boop who’s seen and done things, who serves as the muse, the artist’s alter ego, and much more than that. Often placed in realistic, photograph-like settings, the paintings are difficult to wrap your head around until you see them in person. That’s because Muslimova is so skilled in both aesthetics. Her comic elements give the images a dynamic, general wickedness, and the finely rendered backgrounds ground them in reality, all of it giving a painterly Who Framed Roger Rabbit kind of vibe.

But besides their technical accomplishment, it’s their attitude that does the real work. Muslimova once mentioned, “Fatebe is a solution to a problem. The circumstances she finds herself in are the quandaries that she has to face,” and these circumstances have zero filter. Dealing with her body (and body fluids), social norms, historical circumstances, or myths, the rubber hose muse appears as an unhinged superhero, whose superpower is continuously getting herself into bizarre predicaments and dealing with them in the most absurd way possible. In this show in particular, flipping between this very gallery and her studio in Mexico, she deals with different forms of feeling lost or stuck in-between. Speaking to the artist’s own life as an immigrant and someone who’s both an art-world hermit and a public-facing artist, these works ooze manic disorientation and estrangement and, occasionally, pure slapstick madness. —Saša Bogojev