AGE: 28
BASED IN: New York
If Louis Osmosis didn’t exist, he would invent himself. As his chosen name implies, the artist, born and raised in New York, seems to absorb our rich, concentrated world with glee, reformulating high and low culture alike as streetwise assemblies of arch art history and sidewalk trash. When I visit his basement studio in Chinatown, which he shares with a fellow Cooper Union alum, he’s wearing a T-shirt designed by Pope.L and Supreme, depicting one of the late artist’s “crawls” across New York.
“Redundancy is the thing I tend to go back to,” Osmosis tells me, especially “the Warholian flavor of it.” Through spritely wordplay and citation, his work tries to “compound inertness onto a thing so much that it starts to implode.”
Nearby stands part of his gruesome take on the nuclear (and “nuked”) family: a quartet of mannequins pasted with stringy red viscera like the notorious plastinated corpses of “Body Worlds.” “The prompt I gave myself was, What if Alibaba manufactured mannequins where the colorways were ‘rot,’ ‘decay,’ and ‘cadaver’?” It’s Charles Ray’s postmodern classicism, a rancid homage.
Osmosis’s vibe is, if not the starving artist, then the subsisting one. Dangling from the low ceiling is one of the spiraling assemblages he calls “Centrifugal Pickles,” oversized flypaper channeling Isa Genzken’s magpie taste for the shiny and lenticular. The sculpture appeared recently in Kapp Kapp’s Armory Show booth, surrounded by the artist’s paintings on drywall slabs depicting wriggling cartoon maggots and flies speaking in carrion puns. Splotchy auroras of drink rings, rendered in rainbow hues, cover the backgrounds. “The prompt I gave myself was, What if black mold decided to go pop?” You’d get the musty walls and boozy uninhibitedness of Osmosis’s studio.
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