The Brooklyn Rail

For more than ten years now, Swiss painter Tina Braegger has been making large-format paintings of the Grateful Dead’s marching bears in increasingly potent form. With The Dream Relatives, her third solo exhibition at Meredith Rosen Gallery, Braegger takes her bears to arresting new heights, dancing all over the lines between appropriation and first-principles improvisation with a tenderness that’s as cryptically enveloping as it is joyfully immediate.

If you’re just looking for hippy stuff, this isn’t the place. The dazzling Heathen (all works oil on canvas; all works 2025) pits two bulging bears in mortal combat, complete with springs, cartoon knock-out stars and heavy effort puff marks. Their fishy split-eyes merge and bounce off one another with human-esque mouths baring white skeleton teeth. With each punch, they slough off shreds of primary color that confetti-cannon outwards and pile up in the bottom corner of the canvas. Its sentimental antecedent, I Only Think of You, splits a Finder app-faced bear—marching one way, looking another—into two, then four, then a million. Some of them have faces, others don’t, the rest seem to slide off its harsh construction-orange middle point into oblivion (It’s very easy to see how the Finder app could be a place where work goes to die). Oblivion’s a strong word here, but it’s an important one: be it death or darkness, these paintings seem to struggle to exist before you, to emerge properly from their fields without disintegrating.

There’s a painful tension too between the physical, performative process of painting and the psychic act of its execution: the bear in I Want You balloons over a goalless field while bleeding slowly from a paintbrush stab wound to the heart. The bear at the front of In My Secret Life’s head has seemingly exploded into a bright red chat bubble before it could even attempt to paint, while some bears flat out fade away, like the Eric Cartman-eyed midfielder in Fight The Words That Just Won’t Come. The latter two lead to a quixotic emotional conclusion: a winky half-smiling emoticon, a semicolon and a black slash. Perhaps the ultimate malaise—one you keep a piece of to yourself—this mark underpins the whole exhibition with a kind of affective disorder, another potential void from which these paintings still erupt, and perhaps even escape: the emoticon is uttered by or barely eludes an easel/hungry whale in the bear-less I Loved You Best, the only true black-and-white of the show. Braegger’s vampire-romantic title scheme, and her accompanying book of Chess Poems (“I’m not into changes / You’re not on the train / If it won’t be different / It might stay the same” reads “The Weather”) only further a feeling that Braegger’s actively pushing against and through something overbearing and impossible to explain. The feeling is underscored by the primal nature of Braegger’s repetitive impulse and particularly her sense of texture, a clawing at the walls of the immediately possible, that sears itself into your retinas.

If you’re a Deadhead—it’s worth noting Braegger is not—this will all ring a lot of bells. Light-into-darkness-and-vice-versa is, for lack of a better phrase, an extremely Grateful Dead thing to do: The bears themselves first appeared on Bob Thomas’s back cover for the 1973 “History of The Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice),” a kind of hasty in-memoriam for deceased keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan produced by the then-recently imprisoned acid impresario Owsley “Bear” Stanley. If you don’t know about that, and I really can’t blame you, it’s easy to feel ambivalent or nauseous as the saccharine Mickey Mouse-ness of this symbol adorns Vineyard Vines sweatpants, coils down the Sphere in Las Vegas, or is face-morphed into Oregon Ducks on a recent pair of Air Max 90s (Right-wing podcaster Anna Khachiyan, in an accompanying text I feel “;/“ about, does agreeably call them “Labubuesque”). While Deadheadism itself has been explored in a high-art setting before, a la Matthew Brannon, Tina Braegger isn’t interested in any of this baggage. What she sees in the bears is a vessel for painterly freedom, an opportunity to break silence with shocks of pure feeling. In an age of profound symbolic collapse, where it’s easy for one statement to mean another by the hour, Braegger takes on images that are subjectively full of or entirely lacking meaning to stand in as emotional tulpas, duplicate and potential selves. Speech bubbles, keyboard symbols, and stoner cartoons all portray a mind that’s moving boldly despite the haze. Deadhead or not, there’s immense power in this. The bears are as much Bob Thomas’s as they are Universal Music Group’s as they are the enterprising wook’s or tape-hoarding obsessive’s, which is to say these bears are ultimately this painter’s and this painter’s alone. That’s the thrill of seeing them, and the space where The Dream Relatives holds its own as a display of painting against darkness.