Gili Tal has been working with the fridge as a mode for some years. In 2015 at Vilma Gold, London, she exhibited a room of part-filled fridges, showing quotidian items, mostly drinks. More recently, The Bubblegum Police, a two-person exhibition alongside Alan Michael at Hot Wheels London, hosted by New York gallery Jenny’s, included a series of large fridge interior shots by Tal, such as “Big Silver Fridge (Naturalist Clutter)”, and more with the same title again but with the subtitles “(Unrestrained Fantasy)” and “(Bucolic)”. The imagery is large, but slightly obscured: a haze that replaces the closed fridge door but has the same function, to present the inaccessible, especially given the bourgeois allegory of the door. As artist Dan Mitchell wrote of Tal’s fridge works in 2015, “In our daily reactive state, what it means to be modern is to have to deal with the exchange of one poison for another – this is the only rational remedy available for the constant conflict-ridden scenarios of non-living. Art under the conditions of the brutal restoration of neo-feudalism needs to have a form of integrity attuned to the struggle of building a life for the living.”

Gili Tal, “Big Silver Fridge (Naturalist Clutter)”, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Jenny’s. Photo by Tom Carter

Morag Keil’s short film Passive Aggressive 2 (2017) is set in a kitchen, and in 7 minutes and 6 seconds sums up the aspirational worldliness which has always characterised opulence. The film follows the artist as she veers around a kitchen, flinging open the doors of the fridge and cupboards, so that the viewer sees it with new eyes: the assembled spices, fruits, all become excessive, and Keil’s restless exploration an expression of bottomless desire that the fridge fails to mitigate.

Morag Keil, Passive Aggressive 2, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Project Native Informant, London

US-based artist Josh Kline has taken up the mantle that many mid-century pop artists began: artistically employing strategies of commerce and advertising. For “Skittles” (2014), Kline presented a series of industrial refrigerators containing smoothies produced by the artist from unconventional combinations of ingredients. Some are familiar for their purported health benefits like kale chips; others are more reflective of the odd juxtapositions of contemporary municipal life: trainers, phone bills, pepper spray. Each smoothie is a contemporary lifestyle impetus, evoking the landscape of aspiration, taste, and – at times – deprivation in a metropolis like New York City, particularly in its mocking of the juice-cleanse craze.

Josh Kline, “Skittles” (2014). Installation view: New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, MoMA, New York, 2019. Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Joerg Lohse

Win McCarthy’s “Empty Volume” (2019) ventures towards the voyeuristic, and treats the fridge as framework: the artist describes the inside of a fridge as an “organising structure”. The work was shown at Berlin’s Galerie Neu’s innovative group show The Same Room: Julie Becker in dialogue exhibition, and Apartment Life, in Svetlana, New York, 2019. Comprised of a fridge door fully encased in a glass cabinet that’s stocked with butter, probiotics and food containers, the fridge takes on an architectural quality: Hannah Rose Carroll Harris responded that it evoked “the uncanny resemblance of a multi-story complex. The upper level (the freezer door) is slightly off-kilter, perhaps a suggestion that current modes of urban living are at the brink of collapse.”

Win McCarthy, “Empty Volume”, 2019. Photo by Stefan Korte. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

Tobias Spichtig’s Fridge & Mind exhibition at Malta Contemporary (2018) included many used, dented and densely displayed appliances. In a statement, he declared that “the fridge is an institution, even more so than buildings and people. The fireplace of most lives, primarily spent inside, with the plan libre, plan der Freiheit, as a basis of negotiating one’s state of being real. It functions like real estate, holding a steady cold climate to host some rotten basic needs, by using energy and producing heat in exchange […] It stands for the body as architecture. It stands for people.” His fridges are crammed in together, like commuters on the Underground, like tower blocks: the city becomes human-sized yet remains remote (and cold).

Tobias Spichtig, Fridge & Mind, 2018, Malta Contemporary Art, Valletta, installation view. Courtesy the artist; Malta Contemporary Art, Valletta; and Jan Kaps, Cologne

In Helen Hester’s essay “Promethean Labours and Domestic Realism” (2017), she writes that “the idea that automation in the home might eradicate many of the daily burdens of housekeeping is one that has long been promoted by consumer capitalism.” The appliance promises to reduce our domestic workload, but instead it introduces a new pressurised axis, demanding more and more time and energy – less Prometheus and more Sisyphus. As Angela Davis noted in 1983, “the structural separation of the public economy of capitalism and the private economy of the home has been continually reinforced by the obstinate primitiveness of household labour. Despite the proliferation of gadgets for the home, domestic work has remained qualitatively unaffected by the technological advances brought on by industrial capitalism.”

An overabundance of the manufacture, consumption, and daily management of information and goods creates a feeling of collective overwhelm, which then needs to be communicated, shared, and appraised. In this situation, games such as Fill the Fridge! are framed as digital self-care, “manageable edutainment”, or “disciplined distraction”. Broad social disempowerment, matched with a buyable, implementable solution for any storage problem, and a huge leap towards the normalisation of adult self-soothing, has conspired to label this hyperdrive towards organisation a form of normality. This is a coping strategy; a mode of engagement with too much and too little. .

Gili Tal, “Big Silver Fridge (Unrestrained Fantasy)”, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Jenny’s. Photo by Tom Carter