Principal Juror - Anne Ellegood, Curator, The Norton Family Foundation, New York, NY

Juror's Comments - Steeped in tradition yet consistently buoyed by innovations and insights relating to process, materials, and breadth of investigation, the medium of painting has a fascinating way of presenting itself as simultaneously old and new. The story of painting within the history of art is long and meandering––dramatic, revolutionary, and seductive, yet at times insular, sullen, and desperate for validation. Just think of the imagery and anecdotes conjured at the mention of Michelangelo, Cezanne, Manet, Picasso, Malevich, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Kerry James Marshall, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, or Cecily Brown. And the (growing) list goes on and on. Each time a painter approaches a new work, s/he must contend with this history. Like a cat with nine lives, painting has been pronounced dead on numerous occasions by conceptualists and technophiles, yet it continues to be a vibrant, inventive, and absolutely relevant mode of artistic production within contemporary practice––and it provides so much pleasure. Who doesn’t enjoy spending some time with El Greco, James Rosenquist, or Philip Guston? (to name a few currently on view in major museums in New York City). This combination of grappling with and paying homage to a past while embracing experimentation is wholly evident in the works included in this edition of New American Paintings. In tandem with themes found in contemporary painting throughout the country today, the works from this region are appropriately various, challenging and broadening our definitions of painting.

Visualizing topographies in distinctly different ways, Saul Becker’s semi-abstracted landscapes of lines and grids (made in part from the unique patterning of his fingerprint) are concerned with the systems of ordering used within the history of painting and science to visualize and understand natural structures, while Justin Moore’s islands floating in a void are enchanted lands existing somewhere between a familiar tropical island and the site of a children’s fairytale or a science fiction novel. Working within the idiom of abstraction, Mary Hackett is also intrigued by the methodologies we use to create order out of chaos. Using a vocabulary of abstract shapes that she pins to the wall in potentially infinite juxtapositions, her work confronts painting’s historic tendency toward the frozen pictorial canvas and alternately suggests the possibility of movement and variability.

What one might call conceptual abstraction is strongly represented among the works included here. For these artists, the preoccupations of abstraction––color, line, surface, and texture––are continuously informed by the morass of information readily available to us. Josh Podoll’s Meditations for Easy Listeners #3 might be described as a field of colorful, blurred circles (like visual traces after staring at a disco ball) upon which sits an enigmatic object embellished with a decorative edge and disconcertingly dripping from one side. In Podoll’s artist statement, we learn some of the inspirations for his abstract work, which are remarkable not only for their quantity but for their astonishingly broad range––mineral formations, Agnes Martin, acupuncture, science fiction, and the Flaming Lips, among others.

The crisp lines and cheerful, saturated colors of Kara Maria’s abstractions are complicated by the fractured imagery and central void, suggesting a site at once alluring and dangerous. Interested in the impact of our society’s entrenched and corrupted systems of power, her beautiful images portend the possibility of an apocalypse. Through the repetition and patterning of a particular shape, Rebecca Miller builds abstracted spaces on her canvases that mimic, in a two-dimensional format, as well as natural forms. Wedding the natural forms, lines, and colors of her native Northwest environment with that of largely Eastern modes of creative expression––from calligraphy to Chinese landscape scrolls, from hieroglyphics to Japanese screens––Margot Voorhies Thompson’s paintings can be considered along a trajectory of other abstractionists, such as Joan Mitchell, who looked to the natural. Yet, her sources are so varied, her incorporation of language so integral (she now uses an invented language), and her adeptness with a range of materials and processes so impressive, Thompson has successfully created a body of work uniquely her own that straddles drawing, painting, and printmaking. Michael Reafsnyder takes abstract expressionism on a joy ride in his large-scale, wildly emotional, and pointedly risky panels. Smearing, smudging, squirting, plopping, and layering paint with a child-like abandon, the works evoke so much activity as to make Jackson Pollock appear lazy.

Distinctly different approaches to figurative painting are evident within the works included. Taking the classical practice of using costume and accoutrements to symbolize qualities or convey the status of the subject, coupled with moments of surrealist flair, Timothy Cummings offers viewers insights into his characters while leaving much up to the imagination. While rooted in the traditional mode of oil on canvas, Lien Truong’s provocative take on the family portrait embraces the myriad domestic arrangements that fall outside of conservative conventional definitions of family. Dressed in everyday clothing and devoid of contextualizing scenery or background, viewers are free to create links and reflect upon how Truong’s groupings of figures constitute a contemporary family as valid as any other. Working in the wonderfully iridescent medium of watercolor (which has been experiencing a resurgence of interest among contemporary artists such as Tim Gardner, Barnaby Furnas, Wangechi Mutu, and several others), Kim McCarty’s compelling portraits of adolescents are unnerving for the brash confidence with which the subjects gaze at the viewer while simultaneously capturing all the awkwardness and vulnerability that accompanies this phase of life.

All the artists selected for inclusion here laboriously delve into the medium of painting and its complex history while simultaneously remaining committed to experimentation and new ideas. This willingness to take risks within work that consistently reveals proficiency with materials and techniques combined with strong conceptual underpinnings certainly provides food for thought and lots of visual splendor.