Mini Review: Mike Hartung's 'Gourmet Bile'
Hartung's stinging political commentary returns to the Smoky Valley Arts & Folklife Center in Lindsborg, Kansas.
Lindsborg painter Mike Hartung has done it again. Since 2022, regular exhibitions of his work at the Smoky Valley Arts & Folklife Center, 114 1/2 S. Main St. in Lindsborg, Kansas, have covered the walls with paintings that pull no political punches.
The latest group of 24 is titled “Gourmet Bile.” The exhibition poster painting, “Little Kansas and His Brothers,” features our state’s two U.S. senators as truck-stop prostitutes trafficking a sunflower-wreathed child called Kansas in exchange for orange “Trump Script from a casino long gone.”
Hartung’s accompanying narrative labels are as riotous as they are razor-wire-sharp observations of our current political moment.
“The labels are getting to be more important to the paintings,” Hartung said Sunday in an interview.
A closing reception will take place from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, September 28. The artist will narrate the paintings and take questions in a gallery talk at 2:30 p.m.
His work has always been narrative and figural, but since 2015 and coinciding with the rise of Trump, the stories and bodies are honed to an eloquent edge. Sen. Roger Marshall sports a smeary, off-center Hitler mustache in the poster image. Vice President J.D. Vance dances inside a urinal wearing a bra and toe shoes in “Inspirational Testimonial for Aspiring Rent Boys.”
President Donald Trump’s various painted personae are as a flight attendant with Jeffrey Epstein ushering girls into a plane called Lolita, dressed as the Wizard of Oz (renamed the Wizard of Naus-E-Aaah), an actor on a stage giving scatalogical homage to Putin and Hitler, and a blubbery creature emerging from a golden toilet.
A red warning poster on the door and window tells visitors, “Art can challenge, confront, and even create discomfort,” and advises adults that the paintings are not suitable for children.
— Lori Brack is a contribuor to The SHOUT. She is a poet and writer based in Lucas, Kansas.
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