Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

(link)

Since sculptural figuration’s wastelanding after modernism, its return in inhumanist impulse made sense in conceptual and post-minimal fallout. The humanist passe was instead fit into the acceptable accounting methods of the 60's ruling doctrine, and begetting experiments fitting the body into the cold baths of art’s de rigeur; e.g. Nauman’s uncanny serialization of it. It continued time and artist again until it started actually resembling the body reflected in cold capital, looking prescient for whole new reasons, e.g. Katharina Fristch, Rachel Harrison, etc. or even treating it kin architectural vessel like Andrew Wekua.
And but so its interesting to have someone actually sympathetic to brutal goo of bodies figuration, even insisting on abject Humanism, intercepting hail mary from Louise Bourgoise, without having to treat it to some quasi-spirituality of Kiki Smith or Gober, in firmly materialist occultism.
The work’s overt sentimentality is overboarding, but treads in the acknowledgment of its cliche, the real material of history, well worn, without resorting to symbolic bags of concrete as representative of history to sink the whole ship in awful triteness. The affective pathos of the skin rendered wool and sleeping, really laying it all out there, held in stasis by the uncanny facelessness, just barely hanging in there, the theatricality might be over, but fresh materiality flees drowning symbolism.