Call it approach-avoidance syndrome, but artists in the West have long been engaged in separating themselves from the work of art, indulging what must be a deep-seated fantasy of simply not making anything at all. Photography has most often been indicted for fostering this tendency, and with its links to conceptual art, it’s not hard to see how we get from “the mirror with a memory” (a description of the daguerreotype that minimizes the role of artistic guidance in its creation) to Duchamp’s so-called readymades, and thence to such propositions as sets of instructions, unacted performances, and empty gallery exhibitions. Along the way, the relationship between art and artist has also been undermined by, for example, Jackson Pollock’s drips, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Wade Guyton’s digital outputs. Or as an alternative, consider the example of the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs, demonstrating his technique of finger-painted abstraction on the “Today Show” in the mid-1950s. There are two possible endpoints for this trajectory: either the work of art disappears or the artist does.
Installation view: Marat Guelman and the group + - Komma: First of all, it’s beautiful, Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York, 2026.
Or both—Marat Guelman’s current exhibition at Ethan Cohen Gallery seems to identify a final stage just before art and artist vanish together. The many works in this exhibition seem to parody the history of Western painting. Like Sturtevant but with more humor and less refinement. There’s a Picasso, a Gauguin, a Monet, Warhol and Lichtenstein, Turner and Matisse. My favorite is a version of a Gerhard Richter squeegee abstraction, which, in its original incarnation, was already a kind of machine painting done by a human. (Richter would have made it a lot bigger.) The paintings have two things in common. The first is that none were painted by Guelman himself. Indeed, none were painted at all. In collaboration with the Montenegrin digital art group + - Komma, Guelman programmed AI outputs—monoprints on canvas, really—according to historical models. Since the invention of photography, technology has often played the role of bugaboo to the myth of the artist, especially the painter, as demiurge, a notion salvageable at this point only through the vague notion of a programmer. And maybe not even that. British artist Andee Collard has presented his current exhibition of oil paintings at Lowell Ryan Projects in Los Angeles as “machine” landscapes and attributes to the apparatus all the traditional decisions of the painter: density, rhythm, texture, stroke.
Guelman, however, has something much more urgent in mind than dematerializing the artist. Born in Moldova, he was the very embodiment of the new, post-Soviet Russian citizen. Not trained in the arts, he worked on Putin’s first political campaign, fell in love with art, and became a gallerist and a museum director, only to find himself increasingly at odds with the authoritarianism of his boss. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, he decamped to Montenegro and later to Berlin. He has since been declared a “foreign agent,” effectively a terrorist, and cannot return to Russia. For him, art is no longer something to show but something to use—a way of responding to events. Which leads to the second element all the pieces included in this exhibition have in common: they all feature an image of the atomic mushroom cloud. By turns these can appear ridiculous, gauche, hypnotic, upsetting, and weirdly perfect. For example, Bomb #31 (After Turner and Monet) (2025) stages the mushroom cloud as a diaphanous atmospheric effect. I asked Guelman about the motive behind the motif. He explained: “In my opinion, when Putin played the nuclear card to intimidate Europe from assisting Ukraine, Europe did exactly the wrong thing, which was not to mention it. The United States did the same. That simply showed that they were afraid of this ridiculous threat. I felt I had to do something.” So why not embrace the threat in order to ridicule it?
The monoprints certainly have that effect. The artist and I spent a good deal of time laughing at his Dr. Strangelove revisions of various Impressionists. But there is a ghost in this machine, in all machines. The ghost is us. As someone who grew up watching footage of nuclear tests, I always found them not just fascinating but majestic, even beautiful—unprecedented, despite the horror they signified. Which also seems to be Guelman’s point. In Bomb #41 (After Van Gogh) (2025), a rough and gaudy plein air painting, a crowd of excursionists near a lake watches a fiery atomic explosion with keen interest. It isn’t “good painting,” whatever that might mean in this context, but it is eye-popping and catchy, and it prompts larger questions about beauty and attraction.
So much of the exhibition challenges viewers’ responses, questioning the nature of taste, the attraction of spectacle, and the role of a broadly dispersed sense of art history in the way we look. More deeply, it mobilizes a deeply ambivalent feeling of repulsion, a transgressive unease that has been elemental to the Western avant-garde since the Renaissance. It shows us a subject we shouldn’t like, done in a way that is deliberately provocative, and dares us not to like it. As Guelman remarked to me, this is art with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. The uncertainty of whether that future is to be autocratic and destructive or imaginatively liberating is the territory where this exhibition places us. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.