M. LeBlanc is proud to present “Boothill Express”, an exhibition of work by Peppi Bottrop, H.R. Giger, Sayre Gomez, Servane Mary, Olivier Mosset, and Marika Thunder opening Saturday, November 16th from 5 -8pm.

The exhibition takes its title from a hot rod built by Kansas City customizer Ray Fahner in 1967. The “Boothill Express” is a horse-drawn funeral hearse Fahner restored from the 1850s and souped-up with a 426 Hemi engine. The vehicle was exhibited in the 1969 ‘Machine’ exhibition at New York’s MOMA, and today, the original model belongs to the American Museum Of Speed in Lincoln, Nebraska. As the exhibition’s leitmotif, “Boothill Express” looks at exhaustion, machinic desire, and death in the dusk of the biomechanical age.

Three works from celebrated Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s “Biomechanoid” series act as anchors to the theme. Made in 1969 as part of the artist’s “Biomechanoid” series, the large pewter silver and coal black lithographs are quintessential of Giger’s aesthetic. In the work, human anatomy melds with machines to form the artist’s psychosexual vision for a cyborg dystopia not unlike where we find ourselves today. For example, pictured in Giger’s “Biomechanoid” I is a goggled figure crouched in a loading chamber. The image resembles the artist’s famous 1967 “Birth Machine” but of a more grotesque quality; here, the bullet baby’s tongue is out, and the bottom half of its body melts into a mess of entrails. We can feel throughout Giger’s works a trembling fear of the coming post-human world where progeneration is optimized while what we’ve clung to as our inalterable humanity grows obsolete.

For the past few years, New York artist Marika Thunder has rendered grisaille paintings whose subjects are various automotive and industrial machines and their parts. Cogs, pistons, and levers – parts of curved and gleaming steel lose their utility and journey toward the abstract. Thunder’s contribution to the exhibition is a recent composition titled “Smash”. Simply and deftly executed, the work is a mass of crumpled information, challenging to decipher, but evidential of a chaotic event. Naturally, lurking beneath the surface of Thunder’s work is a creeping eroticism, a fetishization of acceleration, collison, and the evasion of death.

A living master and arguably one of the states’ most influential artists in the grand resurgence of trompe l’oeil and airbrush painting, Los Angeles artist Sayre Gomez has, for nearly two decades, built a practice on iterating Los Angeles and its crises as a mammoth decentralized machine of light, fire, and dust. Gomez is a master of the airbrush, the extraordinary tool that allows him to extend representation into the hyperreal and collapse disbelief into awe. Gomez includes in the exhibition a wink and grimace through Halloween stickers and cobwebs; the combination is a metonymic shorthand where the artist’s machinic process reaches toward the supernatural.

The largest work in the exhibition is a massive canvas by the LA-based artist Peppi Bottrop. Born in the Ruhr region of North Rhine Westphalia, Bottrop’s work is invested in describing in abstract terms the downfall of what was once one of Europe’s engines for the extraction of black coal and steel production. Bottrop inherits this relationship to natural material and to physical, embodied labor from his birthplace. Often completed in a single session, Bottrop’s large scale works nod as much toward histories of abstract painting as they do body-centered performance and the automatic drawing of the early avant-gardists. In the exhibition, Bottrop contributes one of his most recent oversized compositions on rough drop cloth, covered in errant scrawls and sweeping gestures – a finished work, a register or time, a record of labor and exhaustion.

In 1969, the Swiss-born artist Olivier Mosset, moved studios to 34 Rue de Lappe in Paris, where a proto-punk Maoist motorcycle gang occupied the building’s courtyard. Mosset was charmed to full tilt, became a member, and by the following year, was riding a Harley-Davidson leftover by the United States Army during World War II. Mosset quickly began engaging with motorcycles in his studio practice, customizing the first examples in the early 1970s. Over the decades, Mosset’s work has maintained these two resonant poles, between a dismantling of authorship in stealthy monochrome painting and the building of custom motorcycles. On view in the gallery is one of Mosset’s 2020 creations – a 1979 Harley Davidson Softtail powered by a 1340cc V-twin engine with a suicide clutch.

The exhibition’s other sculptural work, “Untitled (Street)” by French-born New York-based Servane Mary, resembles the physicality of Mosset’s bike. The rippled steel stands without a pedestal, cold bent by a rotary press and painted with enamel. The waves in the metal imitate the feeling of speed, and this impression is aided by the large inkjet print of German moto-heroine Anke Eve Goldmann racing towards and off the edge of the work. Mary’s photo sculpture highlights the revolutionary acceleration of instant shutter photography and print reproduction, machinic manipulation of industrial materials, and the motorcycle, a thoroughly modern and swift, clean speed. Also included are two of Mary’s more recent Oxidation paintings constructed with brass metallic paint, silk screen, and green dye oxide patina. The production of this work undeniably references the seriality and repeated actions of large printing presses, but also, through the oxidation process, material and structural decays endured with time.

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Tags: Boothill Express, Chicago, H.R. Giger, Logan Square, M LeBlanc, Marika Thunder, Olivier Mosset, Peppi Bottrop, Sayre Gomez, Servane Mary