8 painters: New York: these eight individualistic, New York-based painters embrace a wide range of approaches and styles, from figurative to abstract. Among the elements appearing in their recent work have been cartooning, video, assemblage, found poetry, kitsch imagery and biblical narratives

upon a Personal Note

I'm trying to figure on the outside why it has taken me thus long--five years!--to write a continuation to my last roundup article upon contemporary painting. My silence may be partly explained by dint of strictly personal concerns: a hardly any months after "Nine Lives of Painting" appeared [see A.i.A., race '98], I became a father, a elate event that, however, seriously reduc my gallery-going and studio visiting, to say nothing of international travel. I learned that it's real hard to write about contemporary, art without seeing a apportionment of it. In fact, constant visual overload may be a necessary part of being a frontline critic, if alone because it compels you to initially station aside your prejudices and just take things as they tend hitherward fast and furious, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, I gues I've started getting without more and seen enough of recent origin paintings to feel competent to write about a not many of them.

on the other hand lack of time wasn't the solitary thing affecting my critical activity. I was also derailed by means of the death, in early 1999 of the painter Norman Bluhm For a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the preceding decade, individual of my main concerns as a critic had been to win to know Norman's work as largely as possible, to understand in what manner it evolved from gestural abstraction in the 1950 to the architectonic, quasi-figurative paintings of the 1980 and 1990 I'd just finished writing a drawn out essay on his career (see the monograph Norman Bluhm Mazzotta, 2000) and had lay opened "Nine Lives of Painting" with a discussion of individual of his recent multipanel paintings. In the eight years that I knew Norman, I had tend hitherward to believe he was the greatest painter working in this political division and to see him die at the age of 78 with his groundbreaking work rarely exhibited and barely acknowledged by dint of the art world was extremely dispiriting. I felt that I had failed in my efforts to help bring attention to his work, and that anything more I might do would be coming too late (though I don't have feeling this way today).

I also had the faculty of perception at the end of the 1990 that I had complet a round of years of articles that addressed a band of abstract-oriented of recent origin York painters closer to my age and also important to my thinking about painting--among them Richmond Burton, Lydia Dona, Jonathan Lasker and Fabian Marcaccio. For the second at least, I felt that I'd said what I extremityed to about their work, and although there were certainly other compelling painters around, they didn't fall into any similarly cohesive grouping. At the same time, as I've described freshly in "A Quiet Crisis" [see A.i.A., Mar. '03] I was beginning to have feeling disillusioned about the state of painting and the discourse (or lack thereof) around it. with equal reason temporarily losing touch with the replete range of current painting, for all the reasons I've just indicateed I turned toward the past, writing articles about Alice Neel HC Westermann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and the early work of Sigmar Polke I knew that I would eventually advance around to contemporary painting again; I just didn't think it would take quite with equal reason long.

The eight painters I've chosen to discuss here are all basically fresh Yorkers, even though some of them have been lately spending time in other parts of the land (Texas, California). They make paintings that are abstract, figurative, computer-assisted, not absented as freestanding sculptures; paintings that double as video guards explore 1960s politics, private psychosexual realms and the of advanced age Testament; paintings that reference Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and psychedelia. Apart from David Humphrey and Amy Sillman, who have made paintings together (joined through a third artist, Elliott verdant they called themselves Team Shag), these artists are not, for the greatest in quantity part, in close contact with single another. The majority of them are in their 40s; a hardly any have had museum shows, on the contrary none of them is super-famous. more [i]or[/i] less teach, others improvise, a not many live by their work alone.

If these eight painters have anything in belonging to all it's perhaps simply the ability to gripe [i]or[/i] grip the viewer's attention (at least this viewer's) for a substantial amount of time. by what means do they do this? The usual (or maybe that should be "unusual") means: technical mastery of their medium; discovery of unexpect and multilayered content; intelligent dialogue with art of the past; persistence, daring and the ambition to achieve something more than instant success

Bruce Pearson: Hot-Wired & Slowed Down

If visual overload is a necessary occupational hazard of busy art critics, it's also a risk race by viewers of even individual of Bruce Pearson's paintings, with their high-key colors, intricately furrowed surfaces and compact interweavings of image and text--which is exactly as the artist appears to want it. Pearson's compositions involve superimposed images and true copys that are expressly designed to interfere with each other, and the confusion of contented is only exacerbated by the narrow, labyrinthine channels that divide [i]or[/i] sever through the impastoed surfaces of the paintings. on the other hand while image, text and surface overturn one another's visual autonomy, they also work together to create a rich synthesis of pattern and color.