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LAG #8 (installation view). Photo: Eva Herzog. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London<\/p>\nThe artist\u2019s work echoes notions of the Red Army Faction as a ghost entity \u2013 and a fading memory<\/p>\n
Maren Karlson\u2019s LAG is named for the last three letters of Axel Springer Verlag: four of the six dark-toned, frequently wide-format, near-abstract oil-and-graphite paintings in the exhibition (LAG #1\u20136, all works 2026) use source material from the conservative German newspaper conglomerate\u2019s own archive. Here, the German-born, Los Angeles-based Karlson paints \u2013 in an oneiric, highly distorted, digitally adjusted manner \u2013 from newspaper images of the 1968 student protests, following the attempted assassination of former Springer journalist and radical student leader Rudi Dutschke \u2013 and claims that Springer titles were being used to manipulate public opinion \u2013 outside the Springer HQ itself. The events of that year became the catalyst for the founding of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Accordingly, in opposite corners of the room, a further two L-shaped canvases depict an assassination via car bomb during the RAF\u2019s 1980s third-generation militant renaissance.<\/p>\n
Across the room, continuing the theme of journalism and antagonism, are two photographs, LAG #7\u20138. A kind of diptych, placed beneath plexiglass, these realise a spy trick from Harun Farocki\u2019s student film Their Newspapers (1968), in which undercover reporters observe members of an urban guerrilla group through holes in newspapers. In her work, Karlson cuts a slit in archival articles on the (later) actions of the RAF, photocopied from the Springer Verlag public archive, through which to observe a second archival image of the Verlag HQ. Through the slit, we see the crenellations of Springer Verlag\u2019s architecture; its sign truncated so only LAG is visible. In LAG #1 and LAG #2, Karlson paints a mutated archival image of the same building: stretched in Photoshop, so that its regimented windows become infinite, attenuated cells, half-obscured by clouds of smoke from burning newspaper trucks set ablaze during student protests.<\/p>\n
LAG #8 (installation view). Photo: Eva Herzog. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London<\/p>\n
Each of the LAG paintings sits within a specially created low alcove in the gallery\u2019s industrial-chic architecture, around 25 centimetres above the concrete floor. In the austere, white space, the greyish works appear like footnotes. The recess, in turn, acts as a symbolic fenestella, a medieval architectural niche that allowed for genuflection (kneeling) by devout pilgrims \u2013 a choice in keeping with the deifying culture around RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof\u2019s posthumous cult of personality. Karlson\u2019s works expand upon German cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit\u2019s description (in an exhibition text for a 2005 show at Berlin\u2019s KW Institute, Regarding Terror) of a \u2018reality-sign RAF\u2019. Karlson builds on that show\u2019s main tenet: that the faction became hyper-abstracted, an entity chiefly formulated by media representations. Her canvases echo notions of the RAF as a ghost entity, living only inside the imagination of a fearful public or an anxious government. Moreover, they maintain a distance from the notion of \u2018the revolutionary body\u2019, to which German artists have historically been attracted (think, inevitably, of Gerhard Richter\u2019s 1988 October 18, 1977 series, based on forensic photographs and portraits of four militants \u2013 three of whom are generally thought to have been executed by state police on the date in question while in Stammheim prison). Although both artists lift from the archive of mass-media images, and Karlson\u2019s technique of physically stretching images in Photoshop, to the point of unrecognisability, prior to painting them, recalls Richter\u2019s squeegeeing of his wet oils, there is a sense that Karlson\u2019s canvases allude to the manipulation, or fading, of collective memory.<\/p>\n
Maren Karlson: LAG at Soft Opening, London, 11 September \u2013 17 October<\/a><\/p>\n From the October 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy.<\/a><\/p>\n Lydia Eliza Trail<\/a>Reviews<\/a>October 9, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The artist\u2019s work echoes notions of the Red Army Faction as a ghost entity \u2013 and a fading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-641209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}