Nancy Lupo

A Golden Shower is something beautiful or erotic or obscene or cruel, depending on which line of literal meaning one follows. It is also sometimes all of these things at once. Central to Nancy Lupo's Golden Shower at Jan Kaps is a continuation of her group of works called ‘tellers’. The name and form relate to a popular origami game, while it also invokes the person or machine at a bank that makes transactions. In the game, a paper is folded into a pattern of pyramidal shapes that one can then move with their fingers, like a cubistic glove, and create different combinations of (sur)faces. The teller can narrate certain aspects of the future, reveal a truth or just be a riddle of colours and symbols with endless possible interpretations. In German the game is called 'Himmel oder Hölle' / 'Heaven and Hell'.

The ‘tellers’ are tooth, mouth, shell and ornament. They have been seen in her last show at Jan Kaps in their original material composition; wood, toilet paper, paper towels, paper placemats and glue. In the original process Lupo adds layer after layer of paper and glue on a light wood structure which slumps as the weight accumulates. For her, the epiphany of the ‘tellers’ were the tents at the farmers market in Los Angeles’s Pershing Square. The tent constructions add the idea of something like bones and skin, like the wings of a bat.

The tellers’ change as they reiterate, they fall from one signifier to the other, just like their namegiver. Now they are more skeletal and only made of bronze, unfolding into the gallery as a maze, fence or a spine. Attached are a row of aluminum balusters taken directly from the office of the foundry where many of the works were produced. Eventually the bronze ‘tellers’ are crowned by a version of a fossil whale baleen. It’s the mouth and tooth again, like an endless riddle or ballad. The poet is the Leviathan, combing oceans, forever grinning like the joker, its mouth open and closed at the same time. To this Lupo adds the blue black lips of a sturgeon who is breathing her last breaths amid market clamber - an endless image shown in Lupo’s video with a layered soundscape recorded at CERN, her Los Angeles home and in various locations in Georgia.

There are two new figurative bronze works present, one is an almost classical statue consisting of three parts or three likenesses as a chimera; the statue of a Georgian architect Shota Kavlashvili by Tengiz Kikalishvili that is located on Baratashvili street in Tbilisi, the dancer Jean Babilée as he appeared in Jaques Rivette’s film Duelle, and the hands of another smaller wooden statue in a vitrine on Kote Marjanishvili St in Tbilisi. The other figure is a slightly sad leather dummy that became bronze.

The sculptures are accompanied by benches, a somewhat familiar scenario in parks and public spaces. Three replicas of a tilted public bench Lupo came across in Tbilisi. It's a continuation of an ongoing series of various public benches she has made since 2015. In each instance they are scaled down to ¾ the size of the original.

On the floor, forming a spiral around the figurative sculptures, are a series of self portraits Lupo drew over the past year. They have been cropped into the shape of the infamous Burger King crown. Additionally there are “collapsed” PVA tellers with gold pigment and a gold painting that repeats the balustrade/lamppost motif. Confusion adds to the pleasure.

In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, a man falls down the ladder into his cellar. Landing on his back, he looks up and discovers between the 18th and 19th step a spot that contains all spots. It's a tiny sphere in which all the places of the world from every angle coexist. Only there and only in this position, otherwise there is nothing. Right underneath the dining room in the cellar.

• Benjamin Hirte

The exhibition is supported by Neustart Kultur and Stiftung Kunstfonds.