Existing comment:
New Image and Post Minimalism:
New Image painting in America pushed the expressionist impulse to the brink of hyperbole, while opening it out to popular and consumer culture. As with Pop Art, "low" subject matter -- bikini-clad girls, children's games, and trite landscapes -- continued to be represented in the hallowed medium of paint. There was a disregard for representational consistency within the image as well as a feeling for space as a series of layered images. The results range from the spare, meditative images of Susan Rothenberg to the cartoonish abstraction of Elizabeth Murray.
These painters were also more apt to treat expressionism as one of many historical styles that could be put on and taken off like a mask. Finding ways to acknowledge that images are constructed -- aesthetically, ideologically, and often quite literally out of Masonite, tile, or roofing tar -- has been a concern of artists since the 1960s. |