She removed the wall panels of the gallery space, opening up the "back office". While referencing Michael Asher's seminal project from 1974, Nettell is less concerned about re-performing institutional critique. Rather her main aim is to consider the concept of transparency in her practice. Against situating a position outside of the art market, she is seeking a critical position within. The brutality of the removal of the wall panels contrasts with the neutrality of the paintings, which in their banality perform another kind of violence. The paintings are screen printed on Dutch linen; the images come from repetitive pixilated gestural movements akin of Abstract Expressionism. They refuse to give the pleasure we often desire in painting. Revealing an act of emptiness through mechanisms of integration exposes the mechanisation of the artist—and by extension the gallerist—in today’s market: artists as producer, industrial labour as practice, quantity over quality, or as Nettell terms it, the “industry standard” of today’s everyday aesthetic production.

The same mechanically produced image in different colour themes has been exhibited twice before, a restyled repeat of an industry standard. The same image (the same artist) appears again via a logic by which only products that have been successful somewhere before become appropriate to be shown again. Offset to create unique variations within the same basic format, individuation is only token.

Removing the stud walls mirrors a brand that trades on transparency. Fashionable in a corrupt way, this tells us little we do not already know. Such rehearsed frictions are as fluid as anything else but to reveal an act of emptiness through mechanisms of integration will quickly become its opposite. Strategies remain strategic and signature insights become conditioned reflex. Here a standardised passivity moves towards a model of participation that is a demonstration but is also true.

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