Event
Some New American PaintingsPost an Event »
Ever Gold Gallery
June 11 - July 11, 2015Info
441 O'Farrell Street San Francisco, CA 94102 Google Map »Reception
June 11, 2015 7:00 pm to 10:00 pmDespite superficial appearances, the best artists working in painting today are not approaching it as a reflexive, medium-specific extension of modernism. Instead, they are using painting as a frame, tool, or focal point by which to get at a number of pressing contemporary issues. The artists in Some New American Paintings address these conditions, leaning towards either the material or the optical in their diverse approaches. While these artists are not necessarily considering the same issues, what links them together as “new American painters” is not simply geography or medium, but that they have internalized these conditions as those which painting, to speak to our moment, must acknowledge. We can see how both material and imagistic concerns inflect our experience of all paintings. In this way, as this grouping of artists demonstrate, those working “abstractly” must address how the non-objective composition is also an image related to a database of historical forms as well as contemporary ones. Just those working “figuratively” must speak to the material implications of images in a digital age—the icons on our smartphones that can do everything from summoning a car, to paying a bill, to sending a message—that are testament to the real world ramifications of the image and the new status of the body in a networked moment.