Holy Monsters Enjoying the Macabre:
The American Painter Joe Coleman in Berlin

By Nicola Kuhn 

Insanity has a system. In tiny small boxes, the life stations of the child murderer Mary Bell are  seen, just as examined as the checks of her gingham skirt. This small monster with the falling-down stockings and skinned knees looks down guilelessly at the views. Mary Bell was 10 years old in 1967 when she killed a 4 year old one and a three-year old. When she was arrested the disturbed child explained murder isn’t so bad, we all have to go sometime. 

Joe Coleman inserts all his love as he paints serial killers, bank robbers and cannibals. Medieval icons are produced in his paintings: executed in minute detail which he creates with the help of a two-hair brush and a jeweler’s loupe. A work of Coleman cannot be taken in passing. It forces itself the viewer by those however-funny many tiny images and text elements, into its world that sink abnormalities. And the small Mary Bell already appears no longer alone and monstrous, but abused as a victim of family conditions, permanently incapable of empathy. But Coleman, this connoisseur of the wronged, doesn’t leave it at that. Maliciously smiling, he sets into the four corners of the painting celebrity child murderers like the assassins of Columbine. 

This first exhibition from Susanne Pepper, the new chief of KW, is a triumphant drum roll. With tension expects, because from that 33-year old less not required than the immediate stimulation that last herumdümpelnden institution for exhibition. There’s the pressure of raised expectations in the art world this summer, which includes Documenta, the Biennale in Venice, and sculpture projects in Münster, the house must find its form. Only so much was certain, Susanne Pepper always makes everything different than expected. One can only hope she continues on with her anti-blockbuster path. With her furious one-man exhibition of the exceptional American Joe Coleman, she’s succeeded. The horizon broadens with the intensity of each painting, and so in this one man show, a multiple perspective triumphs.  This show falls into the category of great exhibition. 

The American Coleman is a cosmos unto himself; only recently has his path crossed with its ways cross with the official exhibition establishment - since Rotterdam’s Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum hung one of his works beside a Breughel. The 55-year old self-taught artist is a modern version of the moralist story teller. What in the Middle Ages were holy legends are now the bloodstained narrations of martyrdom, and death on the cross is today the acts of psychopaths. 

“I really believe that serial murderers possess something holy. They are shamans who have given themselves over to dark places,” he said in in a discussion with Pepper. The viewer immediately begins to reflect on the painter’s own soul, and then that of the curator who selected these works. 

That cannot be achieved so simply, even if Coleman speaks openly about his pyromaniacal inclinations as a child. Like his anti-heroes, but on an artistic level, he opens a door to our the dark side. In his works of art this place on the other side can actually be entered. In the main exhibition hall, Coleman presents pieces from his “Odditorium,” as his curiosity cabinet is called, which he’s steadily been expanding in his Brooklyn dwelling for 30 years. Arranged in three former circus cars, Lee Harvey Oswald’s head in wax are to be seen, a curl of William Clark Quantrill’s hair, to whose gang Jesse James was also a member; or a stuffed two-headed calf. 

One may turn away in fear, or feel voyeuristically drawn in. Another Berlin artist, George Grosz, knew how to play this keyboard of the bad and abnormal perfectly, to whom Coleman dedicates one his pictures. The disasters of the Weimar Republic feel near. For Coleman, today they’re called the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution and drug consumption, as well as the Bush government. Like Grosz in the ‘20s, he vividly holds up a mirror to reflect his time. 

Works of art on view at KW Institute, Auguststr. 69, to September 2nd.