Kati Kirsch at Cheremoya

Kati Kirsch, Paper Goods (installation view) (detail) (2024–25). Image courtesy of the artist and Cheremoya. Photo: Evan Bedford.

The goods in Kati Kirsch’s Paper Goods are, first of all, ceramics: milky, candy- colored objects, tiny and spread like gnome or fairy talismans throughout Cheremoya’s gallery. A single miniature laced-up brown boot sits coquettishly by the window. Books the size of thimbles hang from relatively oversized white ribbons. These ceramics, imperfect with their crinkled edges and thin, colorful glazes, join Kirsch’s oil paintings. At once serious and playful in their dreamy depictions of doll-like figures and objects, Kirsch’s paintings work just as hard as the ceramics to destabilize our ideas of the dainty or cute. Wishing wells and prize-ribbons don’t hide their childhood and fairytale associations—but they’d be hard to dismiss as simply twee. Every tiny object and painted scene in Paper Goods whispers an eerie nostalgia and is filled with enormous, ungraspable spirit. Through nail-polished embellishments and gauzy ribbons, Kirsch troubles the trinket with a distinctly feminine spirit, opening up a wondrous dream-space. Her glassy oil menageries and intricate, delicate sculptures blend elements of the mundane and the uncanny to redefine decoration as an investigation into the vitality of objects.