In his first stateside exhibition, “ANDROID KOSCHMIEDER,” Andrei Koschmieder seizes the license contemporary art offers its producers to fabricate works wholly dissolved of custodial convention. Here, the distinctions that stratify media into concrete disciplines have liquefied—sometimes quite literally, as in this show’s thirteen epoxy resin pieces—into an elastic hybridity founded equally on gestural interpretation and industrial specifications. In keeping with this gravely irreverent stimmung, one is tempted to label Koschmieder’s pieces simply as “resins” in place of typical referents such as painting or sculpture.

Infused with vibrantly colored pigments and digital graphics of human hands—from a skeleton’s to George Clooney’s—that have been enlarged onto calligraphic paper, these resins also bypass the distinctions maintained between two-dimensional and three-dimensional media through their materialization as freestanding columns and thin textural sheets suspended from the gallery’s walls by metal clamps. The sensory associations of vision and touch that accompany such medium-specific distinctions are here wholly consolidated, while Koschmieder’s use of the limitless scale of digital imaging and the crystalline seepage of his material’s industrial ooze accordingly emphasizes the phantasmagoric quality of his objects.

When viewed in context of the widespread implementation of touch screen technology, this equivocation of vision and trace is certainly no longer a cultural incidence unique to the mythic site of the artist’s hand—which might lead one to wonder whether the gestural bravado required to catapult pixels across the surface of a tablet computer is equivalent to the gestural bravado we seek in a contemporary art object. With images of detached hands appearing throughout like auguries borne of a witch’s cauldron, Koschmieder impishly answers yes. Passing from flesh to bone, this once privileged anatomical apparatus of human techné is satirically redirected, prompting us to consider its present role as the preeminent instrument of consumer technology.

— Sam Pulitzer