Existing comment:
Painterly Abstraction:
The death of painting has been declared many times, and never more frequently than in the mid-1960s when artists appeared to be giving up their traditional studio practices and exploring unconventional materials and processes. Nevertheless the creation of painterly works continued throughout the late 20th century. While the artists represented in this room did not subscribe to one particular school of thought, their works represent a painterly approach to many of the ideas explored by Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
Many of these works share an embrace of thick paint, lush surfaces, and dense materials such as oil paint, wood, and encaustic wax. Figures and text appear as elements in abstract compositions. Despite the emotive quality of their colors and surfaces, many of these works trouble the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Ron Gorchov created shaped canvases that work between Barnett Newman's mysticism and Frank Stalla's structured canvases. Alfred Jenson relied on external conceptual systems, rather than improvisation, to organize his compositions. The works in this gallery --- neither purely subjective nor purely objective in their content -- complicate the easy binaries of painting and sculpture, image and object, expression and logic. |