Trey Abdella at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

In Berlin, the artist’s hybrid paintings play a cat-and-mouse game of Shining-style horror and wintry schmalz. Perfectly timed with yuletide, the dense, tonally varied, mixed-media assemblages of Trey Abdella (*1994), of West Virginia, dangle a promise of festive cheer, only to expose the fickle, superficial sentiment that lies beneath. Even when he tones down his more cartoonish excess, and works in a more illustrative, realist mode – as in A Little Birdie Told Me (all works 2025), a beautifully rendered painting of a young boy whose face is obscured by an oversized pinecone – any hint of tenderness is stripped away by the seemingly random inclusion, in the center of the boy’s eye, of a howling man. It’s typical of the artist, offering the comfort of familiar, mawkish imagery, only to crush it with nasty visual intrusions – often arriving so shockingly and so insidiously that it’s impossible to find them funny.