COMMA 15 was one of three solo exhibitions under the rubric ‘Painting as Minor Form’, which asked how marginal modes of painting can operate as critique of more established formalist painting canons. Kiaer’s research generated a provisional and fragmentary position for painting within contemporary art practice.
The three exhibitions proposed three different qualities of the minor form. At (COMMA 15) Bloomberg SPACE, London (2010), Kiaer looked into the underlying narrative of Alexandre Dumas’s Black Tulip for its motif of the offset bulb as a mode of refinement towards black. For the Kunstverein München (2010) Kiaer re-evaluated the original premise of the Kunstverein – whose concern was the mercantile presentation of minor still-lives, portraiture and genre paintings – as an alternative to the institution of the academy, which was primarily interested in the grand gestures of history painting. The exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2011) provided an opportunity to look at the work of 18th-century painter Pietro Longhi in conjunction with the architect Carlo Scarpa, both of whose practices could be understood in minor terms of refinement, taste, and manners as an alternative means of critique to formalism.
In a review for Art Forum (2010), Gilda Williams identified this inquiry into painting as a minor form as offering an alternative route in painting to what has become an over-generalised understanding of ‘painting in the expanded field’. Works from these exhibitions are now in public collections, including Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and FRAC Île-de-France, Paris. Interviews, articles and reviews of this project have been published in Art Forum, Art Monthly, Guardian online, Art World and Tate etc.