“A Certain Form of Hell”—Karma Gallery’s summer pop-up in Thomaston, Maine—is the second exhibition that borrows both title and inspiration from a painting in Ed Ruscha’s series exploring the dichotomy of heaven and hell. It’s a riposte to last year’s ”A Particular Kind of Heaven.” The exhibition is a salon-style installation of almost 150 paintings and sculptures hung inside of Ann Craven’s deconsecrated church by artists who are well known and less so, living and gone.
The overarching rubric is lightly held and loosely applied, meaning there’s something for everyone. Some inclusions are puzzling, such as Mathew Cerletty’s Ribeye (2025), a photorealistic oil-on-linen of packaged steaks. While certainly infernal to a vegan or vegetarian, or those offended by industrially farmed beef, carnivores may lick their chops. There are several Craven works that are not particularly—if at all—Hadean. But no one’s going to quibble with the owner of the space that houses her New York gallery Karma’s exhibits each summer.
Does it hold together? Does it need to? Salon hanging is about variety and quantity. A theme might unify it to some extent, but it can never really be—nor, I’d argue, should it be—homogenous. “Hell” is also driven by commerce. It’s not surprising to find Cerletty and Craven, as they are both in Karma’s stable (also Milton Avery, Dike Blair, Calvin Marcus, Thaddeus Mosley, Maja Ruznic, the one-name artist Tabboo!, among others). This venue gives them (and Karma) access to a different audience. And there is something incredibly democratic about the way Craven and Karma collaborate to skim off some of the cream atop the Maine art scene, bringing in established artists like Tom Burckhardt, Kathy Butterly, and Katherine Bradford, but also including young talents like Kate Hargrave, whose first solo show at Moss Galleries in Portland sold out within twenty-four hours.
Fire imagery abounds—a kitschy Ugo Rondinone, Tabboo!’s Burn in Hell, MF! (1996)—and so does red, most sumptuously in Ruznic’s The Field of Forbidden Flowers/Makovi Divni Crveni (2024), but also in Melanie Essex’s RED PORTAL (2024) and Richard Mayhew’s Untitled (Abstract Composition) from 1975. There is suffering: Bo Bartlett’s Burial at Sea (2020) and Katherine Bradford’s Carry Painting (2022), which appears as a modern pietà.
But the show’s strengths lie in abstraction and surrealism. There is something about the former’s contextual ambiguity and the latter’s undercurrent of eerie incongruity that conjure an uneasy state of not-knowing, inviting our projected fears and dark visions to fill the voids left by these genres’ unspecified meanings. Bartlett’s Wrapped Bust (2014) recalls Magritte, invoking suffocation and erasure—or death. The title of Cecily Brown’s Wee Hell (2025) directs our interpretation of this maelstrom of chaotic brushstrokes. But even without its title, the piece emanates a frenetic clash and dissonance. The corpuscular reds of Peter Bradley’s J Train #6 (2022–2023) and Hermann Nitsch’s Rovereto VI 64.Malaktion (2012) bring to mind splatters and spreading pools of blood. Milton Avery’s Charred Forest (1939) alludes to apocalypse or mass destruction; Jay Stern’s December House (2025) to creepy voyeurism or government surveillance. Predatory animals—Sam McKinniss’s Salazar’s Pit Viper (2022) and Brett Bigbee’s Toward Dark (2023)—skulk and stalk.
In this abundance, whether all of it sits comfortably within the curatorial schema or not is beside the point.
“A Certain Form of Hell” is on view through August 31 at Karma, 70 Main Street, Thomaston, Maine.
