JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints on sintra, made in 2014. Each print is sized roughly 38×30 and is available in an edition of 3+1AP. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Hanna Liden’s newest works bring a flash of ironic New York grit to the sculptural studio still life genre. Set against featureless white backgrounds reminiscent of a commercial product shot, each construction stages bright deli flowers in an unlikely improvised vase. Aside from an orange traffic cone and a leather boot, nearly every item on display could easily have been found in a nearby neighborhood bodega.

What makes these images more than just one-off jokes is that Liden gets the urban attitude just right – it’s a dark insincere fuck you with a silver lining of irreverent jaded humor. Saccharine titles like Welcome Home, Good Luck, My Deepest Sympathies, and It’s a Pleasure to Serve You overlay rumpled plastic bags of random flowers, unnatural blue blossoms in discarded coffee cups, and a precarious tower of a plastic six pack ring (empty of course) and a pineapple painted dirty black.

Liden gets even more sculptural with single blooms that emerge from stacks of everything bagels, crumpled beer cans, and a half empty wine bottle (the last one decorated with plastic sunglasses and endearingly titled Fuck Summer). Flowers are stuffed in Gatorade bottles and dingy socks, each makeshift concoction an incongruous mix of possibly good intentions and world weary playfulness. Their ironies are so blunt they actually work.

While there is an inherent simplicity to this project, it’s been executed with enough brash style to keep things lively. The photographs capture a specific city mood, one that couldn’t care less, but is still trying.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8000 each. Liden’s work has recently begun to trickle into the secondary markets, but so few lots have changed hands at auction that it’s hard to chart much of a price history. As such, gallery retail is likely still the best option for those collectors interested in following up.