Check out this video by James Kalm, a working artist living in Brooklyn New York. He has been an active critic for over twelve years writing for the controversial Brooklyn Rail http://brooklynrail.org/.
‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’
By KEN JOHNSON
Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street, Chelsea
Through Aug. 30
Painting today is not what it was. The last time painting seemed to be
urgently important was the 1980s, when Neo-Expressionists like Julian
Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, Conceptualists like Peter Halley and Sherrie
Levine, and fun-lovers like Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring were
ascendant.
Organized by the critic Raphael Rubinstein, “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”
fruitfully if inconclusively reconsiders painters who did not fit into
then fashionable categories. His 15 artists, all born between 1939 and
1949 and each represented by one piece from the ‘80s, are diverse. The
show includes humorously updated Surrealism by Carroll Dunham and
Elizabeth Murray and plays with Modernist devices by Thomas Nozkowski,
Jonathan Lasker, Mary Heilmann and David Reed. Bill Jensen and Terry
Winters introduce organic, vaguely botanical imagery, while Louise
Fishman and Pat Steir revive Abstract Expressionist-type compositions.
Joan Snyder and Stanley Whitney created wide, landscapelike works made
of myriad paint strokes, and Gary Stephan, Jack Whitten and Stephen
Mueller proffer different sorts of enigmatic symbolism.
Did these artists “reinvent” abstraction? That claim doesn’t sound right
considering that they all deal in familiar formal vocabularies and that
many of them folded in representational imagery. In his catalog essay
Mr. Rubinstein rightly credits all with faith in a grand painting
tradition dating to the early Renaissance. Implicitly he laments a
widespread loss of faith among artists today. But why the medium no
longer elicits such quasi-religious devotion from later generations of
artists remains to be explained.
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