Michael Lindeman’s Artists Anonymous is part exhibition, part group therapy—wry, humorous, and uncomfortably familiar.

Artists Anonymous, titled after the two-part installation at its core, reimagines the gallery as a therapeutic space. It is shaped by Irvin D. Yalom’s ideas on personal transformation, alongside echoes of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics.

When entering the gallery, a large, illuminated sign—reminiscent of those found outside community halls and churches—announces a weekly schedule of satirical group therapy sessions, including meetings to assist with Weaning Off Impasto, Emerging and Submerging and Hustle Fatigue. Beyond this, a circle of absurdly modified children’s chairs stands as proxies for various artist archetypes, from the ‘Emerging Artist’ with training wheels to the ‘Impasto Painter’ with paint-caked boots and t-shirt.

In his Regression Paintings, Lindeman retreats—both literally and psychologically—in a Freudian sense into finger-painting and text on mirror, embracing juvenile, gestural aesthetics to reflect on the anxieties of the art world. Tied to phenomenology, the viewer’s reflection becomes central to the work. Text glides across the mirror’s negative space, dissolving the boundary between spectator and subject. These works playfully propose a synthesis of social, institutional, and self-critique.

The exhibition also features a suite of hand-drawn text works, including a tongue-in-cheek Career Development Checklist, absurd lists of Predictions for the ‘culture industry,’ and a deadpan manifesto masquerading as self-help guidance for artists. Further blurring fact and fiction, Lindeman presents framed ASIC certificates for Duchamp Plumbing and the Agitated Citizens Against Spam Association (ACASA)—originally fictional entities from his creative-critical writing, now officially registered businesses.

These fictional threads continue off the page and into the gallery, where three characters conceived in Lindeman’s fictional writing are brought to life: a plumber now employed by Duchamp Plumbing, a brandy-sipping Eastern European lady making sculptures with fruit, and a disgruntled psychotherapist who paints between appointments. Performed by silent actors, they drift through the space—present yet disjointed—connecting “levels of reality.”

Artists Anonymous reframes the gallery as a site of hybrid therapy and quiet resistance, where humour and critique coexist. Rather than offering resolution, it proposes a holding space—for truth, contradiction, and the peculiar rituals of art and those participate in it.