Adrian Norvid brings high school angst, dark, piercing humour, and ruthless self-depreciation to Galerie Joyce Yahouda.

The gallery’s large exhibition room is dominated by a massive drawing illustrating a school dance gone awry at the fictitious Finkola High. The work is dense with acerbic visual puns and underhanded jokes. Norvid is merciless. With razor sharp wit he identifies every high school stereotype and then executes a karate shuto with his mighty brush. The metal head wears shiny braces, the beauty queen lost her head (literally), rolls of toilet paper and bottles of booze litter the floor. Noone gets away unscathed. Chaos reigns.

The atmosphere of cacophony is extended by Adrian Norvid’s installation and performance The Cantankerous Krank: The Thralldom of the Thrill and Other Musical Notsoniceties in the gallery’s smaller exhibition room. Here the artist presents a series of his three-dimensional drawings, all related to music, fusing Baroque, Rock, and Contemporary Composition. Organs and spinets created out of paper stand alongside an assembly of actual keyboards, surrounded by dripping paper candles. Dressed in a black and white outfit which makes him look as though he just stepped out of one of his own drawings, Norvid sports a Baroque wig fashioned out of paper curls, adorned with inky splats of bird poop. This is Norvid’s curmudgeonly alter-ego Wilhelm Wurstfinger Krank. If you happen to be at Joyce Yahouda Gallery at the right time (somewhere between 12noon and 5pm Thursday – Saturday), Herr Krank can be seen pacing his studio, writing furiously, even playing an “improvised musical texture.” Norvid’s artist statement features a description of Krank, written by Ivan Lessthangenerous from The Moscow Organ Review: [Krank is] “…well preserved considering he must be at least 250 years old – an undoubted fake and a terrible scatterbrain at the keyboards. Whatever he essays comes out sounding like the musical equivalent of mucilage.”

High school bullies, prom queens, music stars, academics – Adrian Norvid takes them all down a peg or two with panache. It smells like payback.

Galerie Joyce Yahouda, space 516
Adrian Norvid
Finkola High and
The Cantankerous Krank: The Thralldom of the Thrill and Other Musical Notsoniceties
February 9 – March 17, 2012
www.joyceyahoudagallery.com