Mia Goldstein: Handle With Care

Paint what you know.

It’s decent advice, provided you know something interesting. And it has stood the young artist Mia Goldstein in good stead thus far, given that she’s painting a corner of the contemporary art world that gets little attention: art’s end-user space. 

In other words, its final destination. Usually, art’s vast myth-making apparatus focuses on origin stories: the seductive tale of the aesthetic genius using the blood of their tortured imagination to bring a new vision to life (and gallery walls). Goldstein does something less tortured but ingenious nonetheless. She finds her art where art ends up: on the walls of collectors’ homes.

These are scenes she knows like the back of her hand, having grown up in Los Angeles as the child of parents in fashion retail who were devoted collectors of art and design, and who always encouraged Goldstein’s early interest in painting. Her plan when she came to New York University in 2020 was to study art history, but gradually her interest—and her major—shifted to studio art.

From the outset, painting art as she saw it, in situ, felt natural. She started off simply: painting rooms in her family’s house in Los Angeles. A few chance commissions from other collectors—for a portrait of, say, their living room—cemented her interest in this mise-en-scène as a subject. Then, she became more inventive—taking a room she knew, but swapping this painting or those chairs out for stuff she liked better.  She was actively recasting the realm of well-heeled contemporary collectors as a kind of personal aesthetic lab where she could play both decorator and curator to her art’s content.

For her debut solo show, titled “Handle With Care,” at New York’s Journal Gallery, Goldstein went one step further and pictured works in transit, spotlighting not where the artworks come to poetic rest, but the often strange, ungainly or undignified ways they arrive there. In one, an iconic Francis Bacon painting is given extra sfumato via plastic sheeting for transport. One depicts a blue-resin Lalanne hippopotamus being crane-hoisted up to a tony apartment. Another shows a giant, carefully wrapped Claes Oldenburg hamburger being gingerly moved out of a high-design elevator that is barely up to the task. Another, picturing a Magritte laid in the back of a SUV, was inspired by a true story from her days working at a blue-chip gallery. A collector wanted to see if a multi-million-dollar painting would look right at home, right now—so it went over in a car trunk.

But as humorous as the works might sound, Goldstein is not simply shooting for comedy or critique. Her style is illustrative, snapshotty, like documentary collateral that shows the awkward compression and fanatical care that takes place in transit. Like many artists who have had both studio and gallery jobs, Goldstein is keenly aware of art’s many stages, from creation to crate, from wall to wall. Rather than picturing artworks as either precious slices of soul or luxury commodities, the carefully packaged artworks in Goldstein’s paintings inhabit a surreal third position, almost like inanimate celebrities, worshiped as priceless and ranked for their price. By not denying the truth or the reality of either view, the paintings make a refreshingly candid argument that it doesn’t matter whether art “should” be about commerce or beauty. Like Goldstein’s show, art is about packaging both.

– David Colman