For its summer show Ulrik presents “Intimacy” – an exhibition held in three bedrooms within the Brooklyn
artist loft, Taaffe. Founded by Elise Duryee-Browner and Damon Sfetsios in 2013, the loft has historically
presented exhibitions, cafe nights, and parties.

Ulrik began by linking three artists to three residents based on explicit and potential relationships in the
pairing. By taking the contributors’ own bedrooms as the starting point and mise en scène, the theme of
intimacy becomes text and subtext.

In the first bedroom, projected above writer Hiji Nam’s unmade bed, is Matthias Groebel’s 1995 video Trusted
Faces. The work consists of a hallucinatory parade of faces which shift and blend from one to the next. These
characters are drawn from Painted Faces, a series of computer assisted paintings Groebel made throughout the
1990s. In the opposite corner is Faces, with manipulated photographs from a psychology experiment utilizing
frame-by-frame microanalysis of mother-infant relations mounted on planks of wood, in a work made by
Nam specifically for the exhibition.

Across the hall in the bedroom of Matthew Linde are two animated films by Belgian artist Anne-Mie Van
Kerckhoven (AMVK). Made twenty years apart, the works highlight AMVK’s distorted approach to figuration
and her ongoing interest in the spiritual encounter of human and machine. Her 1984 film, De 4 Uitersten (The 4
Extremities) mixes rapidly sequenced faces painted in nightmarish colors intersecting with allusions to the four
Jesuit extremities of Death, Judgement, Hell and Divine Glory. Set to a booming drum and bass soundtrack,
Cumulator (2004) depicts the artist trapped in a domestic environment overwrought by digital chaos.

The exhibition continues in the bedroom and studio of painter Damon Sfetsios, whose portraits of his
women roommates painted under the influence of Cézanne face off with the work of artist Antek Walczak, a
close friend and founding member of Bernadette Corporation, for whom Sfetsios worked as assistant. Antek’s
works-in-process involve programs used to pirate 3D graphics from popular games into raw material for
hobbyists. An oversized screen beside Sfetsios’s bed shows 3three BDSM Room86 Restaurant, a video depicting
two young men in bondage scenarios being sadistically dominated by an alpha man in an empty McDonald’s,
while in 1solo walk Room14 Area 51, a serene, lonely woman paces a square of trees and grass amongst giant
floating refrigerators.

Matthias Groebel (b. 1958 in Aachen, DE) has, over the past four decades, created a unique oeuvre featuring
paintings based on images from television, along with drawings, photographs, videos, and research works. As
a trained pharmacist, Groebel came to art in the early 1980s as an autodidact. It was during this period that
private analog satellite television spread throughout West German households, allowing unprecedented
round-the-clock access to a wide range of international television programs. Groebel’s works reflect this new
media condition of open-access television, which directly paved the way for the subscription-based streaming
and pay-per-view services of today. Groebels first institutional exhibition and survey A Change in Weather took
place in 2022 at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, organized by Katherin Bentle and Andreas Selg.

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, (b. 1951 in Antwerp (BE), lives and works in Antwerp (BE). Since the early
1980s, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has been prolific in her output of drawings, paintings, collages, video and
digital works. A straightforward female tone prevails in all her works, in which the erotic meets machine
fetishism. Interiors if not domestic spaces often serve as settings for her drawings and collages, from which
dream-like futuristic enactments between human and machine-like forms unfold. AMVK has had solo
exhibitions at Fridericianum (Kassel), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Kunstverein Hannover, Museum
Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), Kunstverein München (Munich), Kunsthalle Bern, FRAC Pays de la Loire
(Carquefou), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), WIELS (Brussels), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (Nuremberg), M HKA (Antwerp),
DAAD (Berlin) and Kunstmuseum Luzern.

Hiji Nam is a writer and psychoanalyst-in-training in New York.
Damon Sfetsios (b. 1982 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,) lives and works in New York. Sfetsios studied at
Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, guest student of Michael Krebber/Josef Strau. Previous solo exhibitions
include Mother Culture, Los Angeles, 2021 (online); Edouard Montassut, Paris, 2018; Eclair, Berlin, 2017.
Sfetsios has also presented at Frieze London 2021 and Art Athena 2022 with Christian Anderson. Previous
group exhibitions include Piktogram, Warsaw, 2018; Icon Museum, Warsaw, 2018; DREI, Cologne, 2017;
DELF, Vienna, 2017; Tbilisi 16, organized by Kunsthalle Zürich, 2016; BQ, Berlin, 2016. Sfetsios has written
for Texte zur Kunst, Spike, and May Magazine.

Antek Walczak was born in 1968 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and lives in New York. Antek Walczak is a
video-maker, writer, and artist who works in painting, drawing, and installation art. He was a founding
member of the 1990s fashion and art collective, Bernadette Corporation. Both his solo and collective works
have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Witte de With, the Stedelijk Museum,
the Centre Pompidou, the Hamburger Bahnhoff, Museum Ludwig, Fri-Art Fribourg, Kunstehalle Basel, and
elsewhere. He has been published in Purple, Zehar, Texte zur Kunst, May Revue, Afterall, and Spike
Magazine.