Penny Goring

Debuting two new bodies of work—a group of plush Forever Doll sculptures and a sequence of paintings on paper from her ongoing Amelia series—the show stands as the latest incarnation of the visual language that Goring has been developing since the early 1980s. Returning insistently, compulsively, even, to these loosely female forms, Goring animates corporeal shapes—often contorted, mutilated, lanky limbed, or headless ones—with a charge that melds violence and vulnerability. Such questions of recurrence permeate Chronic Forevers, in which the temporality of trauma is made manifest: memories held in the body, personal histories re-lived and reimagined. Goring’s work processes a swirl of input including experiences of love, loss, addiction, depression, single motherhood or living within the welfare state, finding physical form for how this felt. Her work troubles boundaries between interiority and exteriority, as her figures wear their hearts—or their internalized oppressions and emotional turmoil—on their sleeves. Goring’s work is concerned with the conditions of its own production, which have been informed by the UK’s current cost of living crisis, just the latest iteration of decades of systemic violence enabled by ruthless neoliberalism. The sense of urgency in Goring’s work derives from making art both despite and because of these circumstances, which also dictate her material process. Goring hand-stitches cheap fabrics and other found materials, often works with free online software, ballpoint pen and paper, in her home studio. Austerity’s relentless brutality has been, on the one hand, another chronic forever in the London-based artist’s life and work, but the temporality that her work proposes is also a kind of way out, or a way through, its charade of linear progress. Entangled in poetry and dark humor, Goring’s work speaks to the deeply nourishing quality of making. A communion between artist and object is present in these works, which are palpably extensions of herself. Such intimacy extends to the symbiosis of the alter-ego Amelias or the chorus of the dolls. In a giant image macro (a meme format that garnered Goring cult status in the online alt-lit scene in the 2010s) in the gallery’s front window, a band of text across Goring’s face reads, I Know Empty. This also means release. Chronic Forevers marks Penny Goring’s (*1962, London) first exhibition in Germany and with the gallery, following her widely-lauded retrospective at the ICA in London last year. Goring’s video-poems Please Make Me Love You (2014) and Fear (2013) will be screened in the Gallery Weekend Festival at Studio Mondiale. Her work is also included in the Women in Revolt! exhibition upcoming at the Tate Britain this fall. CHRONIC FOREVERS you are in for it you are with big structural emergency sticks in faithless divorced shit storms all is for austerity nothing never who mourns a landscape your grey witness liquid velvet is Amelia's drug death torment in violent centuries as the money is sky you sit ruined weeping liars they are greedy eyes sleeping face falling scared and bleeding and one Amelia the dreadful might be releasing chorus of teardrops dripping lurid forever intimacy visions screaming and severed hairy puddle crawling in too deep over heedless legislation plumb the cold distance from desperation danger selling giant fake future flowers Amelia's crimes laughing who is blue Amelia's promises big as theft is a sky releasing golden cakes sainted icons emotive epiphany blissful Amelia in the trees beside you with kisses for psychedelic starving fuchsia wielding shiny daggers the abusive summer in plagues of thunder aching words two dead faces boiling it's on and on broken are the Amelia years as hell all arms eyes are cursed and Amelia over and over deep trauma Wi-Fi weeping being Amelia.

—Penny Goring