Pamela Rosenkranz’s exhibition at Karma International in Zürich is a complete mess. At first glance, the show lacks the sleek style and execution one has come to expect from an artist who has made a career exploring the slick visual codes and branding techniques used to commodify the natural world. Over the past eight years, Rosenkranz’s critical eye has been drawn to the marketing of bottled water, the anthropomorphization of house paint, even French Nouveau Réalist Yves Klein’s claiming of the sky as his own work of art. This time, however, she has completely wrapped the interior of Karma International’s large storefront location sited on an urban strip mall in loose plastic sheeting, creating what looks like—and at different times, feels like—a studio situation, a condom, and a so-called “kill room” à la American television series Dexter. Leaning against the draped walls are eleven aluminum panels covered with a fluid acrylic polymer tinted in skin tones of beige, orange, red, brown, and pink. The texture of the surfaces varies between thick coats of brutal drippings to large strokes spanning the range of the artist’s outstretched hands. In some of the paintings, the aluminum base is almost completely visible, while others are …

I had dropped out of law school when I met Eve. She was very beautiful. Very pale, cool in her black dress, with never anything more than a single strand of pearls. And distant. Always poised and distant. By the time the girls were born, it was all so perfect, so ordered. Looking back, of course, it was rigid. The truth is she’d created a world around us that we existed in, where everything had its place, where there was always a kind of harmony. Great dignity. I will say… it was like an ice palace. —Interiors (1978), Woody Allen The intersection of art and design, or, to be more accurate, the interest of contemporary artists in design, often leads to interiors that curiously project very little “interiority” about them. Instead, one more often gets a covetous lesson in consumerism: white boxes tricked-out as collector’s homes, wealthy artist’s pads, or similar chamber dramas featuring mid-century furniture, formalist sculpture, and Minimalist plinths (though all might be postmodern approximations thereof). Thus the surprise and delight I found in Karma International’s “Slip Snip Trip,” whose edited constellation of works by gallery artists and Karma friends delineated not just an architectural interior but an incisively metaphysical one …