Principal Juror - Raphaela Platow, Curator, The Rose Art Museum

Juror’s Comments – This edition of New American Paintings brings together forty self-declared painters who pursue a diverse range of interests in painting. Despite the differences in their artistic approaches, they are connected by the materiality and activity of painting, and through their unique investigations of the medium, which acknowledge the wide spectrum of what painting is and what it can be.

Executed with different types of paint on diverse support materials, the paintings in the book depict imaginary landscapes, compositions of forms, the human figure in various situations and states of mind, and urban-scapes; they capture a conceptual idea or function as personal diaries, and are influenced and inspired by contemporary life in general. Some works in the exhibition appropriate the third dimension by extending the painting into space. Carried out in a broad range of styles, techniques, and subject matter, the work in the publication exemplifies the extended realm of painting, and defies the heavily tilled academic acreage that for too long confined the discussion of contemporary painting to the narrow discussion of the death and resurrection of the medium.

(This particularly Western discourse gestated with the advent of photography during the 19th century. It was then that the status of painting was increasingly called into question. Challenged by the supposed veracity of the technical image and its mass production and circulation, painting was pronounced redundant and forced to identify its own domain.) This moment in the history of the medium marks what art historian Yve-Alain Bois has called the “essentialist urge of modernist painting,” which can be described as an analysis of the easel picture’s fundamental constituent parts. What began in the 19th century with Cézanne reached its self-dissolving climax in the United States of the 1960’s when the art critic Clement Greenberg’s formalism reduced painting to the mere physical object. By defining the medium by its manifest physical properties alone, he forced the focus onto the formal qualities that make representation possible in the first place: brushstrokes, color, texture, the picture ground, and the support material. When Greenberg’s hegemony gave way to other cultural forces, painting began to rearticulate its possibilities. Its distinction from photography became blurred when it became clear, first, that photography, too, is a symbolic, pictorial system not directly depicting reality and, second, when the emergence of television and video proclaimed the end of formalist medium-specificity “existing in endlessly diverse forms, spaces, and temporalities for which no single instance seems to provide a formal unity for the whole” (Rosalind Krauss). Like the quality of painterliness, which the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin defined in 1915 as a stylistic quality not limited exclusively to painting but inherent in all media, the works in this book articulate their pursuit of the medium in relation to other contemporary art forms, popular culture, and contemporary imaging techniques. At the same time, the compilation of paintings meditates on deeply rooted traditions within the history of painting.

To attempt to detect a regional style among the works presented in this book would be a forced intellectual exercise. The paintings instead indicate a shift from the “model” of painting that evolved within the particular cultural context of European and North American art history. To become a global medium able to address issues and traditions that lay outside its own cultural framework, painting needed to loosen itself from its dominant intellectual discourse. The works by the artists do not dwell on a limiting and self-evident definition of what painting had become within the recent modernist paradigms. Instead, they evoke the widened spectrum and internal complexity of the medium and allow us to anticipate the directions in which it might be going.

The task of jurying this edition of New American Paintings was both exhilarating and challenging, simply for the overwhelming amount of outstanding work. Despite the fact 40 artists out of over 1,000 were chosen for the publication, the selection is far from being conclusive or an objective gauge for quality. A juror with another sensitivity, intellectual approach, and personal penchant would have chosen a different but equally rich array, so abundant and excellent were the submissions. What this presentation is simply able to state is paintings’ profound importance and liveliness as a medium in the Midwest and contemporary art in general.