Curatorial Statement

It has been a full decade since New York City’s Museum of Modern Art unveiled its first contemporary painting exhibition in 30 years, entitled The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, which concentrated on the disjointedness and notable lack of cohesion in painting style and sensibility. Within the decade between this historic exhibition and today, the world has gotten weirder and even further fragmented. One could easily assert–as often comes to the fore when the activity of art-making defies easy categories–that “painting is dead!” and has been for some time. 

That assertion, however, is not the stance of this exhibition. Painting has and likely will continue to retain relevance as a plentitude of un- or semi-connected perspectives, experiences, and styles. It is precisely this multiplicity of existence, leaving room for the unexpected, that makes “painting” interesting as a discipline. It is through this lens that Painting Today celebrates fragmentation as a rich category in and of itself. What follows is an exhibition culled from many brilliant submissions, and coalesced into groups by shared sensibilities or subjects. Rather than attempting to define any overarching trends, this exhibition takes the present-day-ness of the works’ creation as evidence enough of “today,” and allows a few exceptional artists to warm their works in the spotlight.

– Rachel Vera Steinberg

The Intimacy of Being Observed

Rachelle Agundes / Cathy Ellis / Donna Festa / Zeynep Tekiner

Throughout recorded history, the creation of artworks, and painting in particular, has marked countless attempts to capture the essence of a person or situation. In the West, prior to the rise of photography, painting was tasked with accurate visual description, leaving behind works that would succeed the lives of those depicted. And while photography has long since replaced painting as the primary mode of portraiture–itself having been replaced by scads of digital image-capturing machines–the painted figure remains evocative for embodying senses outside of the visual. 

The works in this section exemplify the ways in which painting has the ability to capture emotional truth. Mostly painted from observation, this group of figurative works asks what it is that is being observed, and how the observation can be translated onto the canvas. Through exaggerated colors and brushstrokes, shadows, outlines, and distortions, these artists have created tender scenes that envelop the viewer. While in most of these works, details of faces and bodies are either soft or absent, an intrinsic interest is driven by the works’ emotional intimacy. What is evoked is a feeling of truly knowing these figures, as if the memories are also ours. As far as the accuracy of depiction, the fluidity of paint can still capture that which an image-making machine cannot.

Holes in the Landscape

Aysha Akhtar / Carol Godding-Paquet / Lori Goldberg / Lola Lefrancois / Gillian Wainwright

This series of works comprises various meditations on natural environments in conversation with the landscape painting tradition. The works in this group are shaped by the tension between what is depicted and what isn’t. The artists here intentionally leave gaps or holes in the works, from negative space, raw substrate, or through acts of destruction. These seemingly empty spaces allow for a sense of fantasy and feeling to unfold in between the brushstrokes. Many of these paintings encapsulate a spatial depth that, while impressionistic, feels accurate. 

Generations have passed since the romantic, pastoral idealism of the Hudson River School, a tradition that continues to both haunt and inform landscape painters to this day. Rather than the awe-inspiring completeness of sprawling land, the works here reflect on this history in the context of what came before and what has happened since. The works give way to momentary impressions and longing. It is as if, in the span of time since the mid-19th century, these paintings have drifted and disassembled into parts and marks, recognizing the impossibility of capturing a vista in its entirety.

The Unconscious Process

Imogen Aukland / Matt Cohen / Bella Ferreira / Lysha Montiel / Randi Reiss-McCormack

These works are driven by material process, and expressed as abstraction. While not every work here fits neatly into the category of “painting” per se, each work can be understood through its respective formal methodology. Using materials such as digital collage, rug tufting, plexiglas, highly pigmented watercolor, in addition to paint and canvas, each work contains its own guiding logic. The resulting images are structural, methodical, intuitive, and organic. Pixels, paint, fibers, and pigments are conscripted into acts of construction, repetition, mapping, coding, and visual experimentation, where the visual result is co-determined between artist and material system. 

The decision making process is at times revealed through transparency, and obscured within the complexity of the works’ surfaces and details. The unconscious history that remains visible is that of the works’ own making, while the evidence of narrative is absent. Together these works raise the questions: what does it mean to understand an image? Can a painting’s logic be understood, yet not decoded?

Energy Loops

Fernando Colón-González/ Vita Eruhimovitz

This group of works pulls together two works by two artists each, presenting a dialectical pairing rather than a collection. Here, maximal collides with minimal, displaying two seemingly extreme examples of continuous, gestural movement. 

Vita Eruhimovitz’s works contain energy aspiring to the level of the complexity of human experience. This energy is dispersed, exploded into abstraction that vibrates every inch of the canvas. By contrast, Fernando Colón-González captures the motion of a single gesture, looping ad infinitum. It is not abstraction-as-reduction that motivates his works, instead it is the fully articulated description of a subject. While tempting to view these artists’ works as opposing, it is more accurate to understand them as a continuum within the idea of movement. Lived experience teems with unremitting motion, encompassing the molecular and the cosmic. It is between these two artists’ works that we can begin to understand that particular resonance, through loops, vibrations, and the vulnerability of following one’s instinct.

The Animated Sublime: Horror and Absurdity

Alex Clark / Madeline Hernandez / Caroline Ivins / Monika Malewska / Maureen O’Hara Ure / Mel Smothers

Why is it that horror and cartoons make natural bedfellows? The artists in this group rely on the exaggerated and narrative visual language of animation, surrealism, and illustration in order to capture various expressions of anxiety, the mundane, and dystopian un-reality. 

At times ghostly, fernetic, and macabre, these paintings explore latent fears and fantasies, as well as an entire spectrum of un-real that exists in between. Due to a naturally rounded and elastic nature, animation, surrealism, and cartoon illustration have all historically maintained a proximity to dark subjects. This can be seen through early cartoons, which relied heavily on absurd violence to explore subjects such as factory labor, exploding technologies, and hunting (one another). 

The works in this section reference the real, but exist on a plane where that which is drawn can never really die, and laughter can act as a salve to horror. The subjects at stake in these paintings: capitalist consumption, mass media legacies, political environments, and larger implications of history, are smuggled in through distorted colors, hard outlines, and dynamic, and at times flattened, perspectives. The chaos and fragility of identity verges on psychotic breaks, as the figures threaten to pop off the canvas and into our lived realities, suggesting that maybe it will be the laugh that kills us.