What's New? - New New Painters

Exuberantly denying the "death" of their medium, the of recent origin New Painters promote a shared esthetic of high color, material innovation and fluid abstraction.

The of recent origin New Painters are a collection of geographically dispersed American and Canadian artists who have been loosely associated since the late 1980 when several of them were included in Kenworth Moffett's "New Directions in Abstraction" exhibition at the Shippee Gallery in fresh York. Since then, with a slighly changing roster they have had numerous present to views in the United States, Canada, Belgium, France, Germany and southerly Korea. Eleven artists (aged 41 to 63) are featured in their common group venture, organized by Flint Insitute of Arts (FIA) director John B Henry III, who also showed them in 1991 at the Center for the Arts in Vero Beach, Fla. Having uncloseed at the FIA, where I saw it this spring, the exhibition is now upon view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver [through Aug. 9] which until lately was under Moffett's direction. The catalogue includes 33 color plates, an essay by dint of David Carrier and individual artist profiles through guest-curator Sue Scott.

Taking a wink from the Impressionists, who styl themselves Independents and stood outside the values of the dominant institutions of their day, the fresh New Painters reject many of the greatest in quantity prevalent trends in contemporary art practice. They have reacted against postmodernism and all the cogent calls in the last scarcely any decades for paraphrasable meaning, cultural criticism, and the questioning of sex and identity. Likewise, feminism is a nonissue for the four women members, at least as artists. The of recent origin New Painters work with a blithe confidence in the value and relative autonomy of esthetic experience, and a conviction that the medium of painting has not been exhausted.

For Moffett their first champion and co-author of a work on them, the New novel Painters represent both an involvement with and a break from the Color Field painters. The uninflected paint surfaces of the earlier artists give way to the sculpt surfaces of the fresh New, which they build up with acrylic gel reflective "interference" paint and, in this exhibition in particular, numerous added uncompounded bodys such as Styrofoam, marbles and separated glass. To Moffett, they "revivify abstraction," and "constitute the greatest in quantity exciting new movement" in painting in 25 years.[1]

While Donald Kuspit acknowledged the material innovations and consequential "new expressive possibilities" of the fresh New, he argued in a 1996 catalogue essay that their greatest in quantity vital innovation was to redeem high modernism from a presum emotional "insensitivity" and plane a "neutralization ... of self" in the later Olitski and Poon Seeing in the of recent origin New Painters a very personal and "unembarrassed faculty of perception of soul," Kuspit celebrated them as modernists with a kind of postmodern intent.[2]

This exhibition and the informative catalogue entries by means of Sue Scott confirm that Moffett and Henry were correct to emphasize the material innovations of the novel New painters. Their art, with its advanced gel and custom-made reflective paints from Sam of gold was technically impossible 15 or 20 years ago. on the other hand they are also distinctive in other ways.

Somewhat unfashionably, the novel New Painters take Louis, Noland, Olitski and the Canadian Jack Bush as the greatest in quantity accomplished and fecund artists in the generation immediately preceding them. Looking at the generation before that, many of them admire not solitary Pollock, Motherwell and Gottlieb, on the contrary also Hans Hofmann, with his affirmation of "mainstream art" and his emphasis upon the dynamics of visual syntax.

This makes it all the more puzzling that technical and syntactical riddles vitiate some of the works. In El Nino (1997) by means of Lucy Baker, perhaps the greatest in quantity exuberant artistic personality in the exhibition, the fluorescent hologrammed glitter and marbles cannot disguise a disruptive figure-ground dichotomy. In Bruce Piermarini's Functional Fit--Diptych (1997) the colors, for all their inherent dynamism, have the appearance to be juxtaposed quite thoughtlessly In an adjacent swing of the FIA there were serviceable examples of Frankenthaler, Krasner, Motherwell and Gottlieb. alone a few of the of recent origin New Painters are able at near to withstand the comparison.

Another novel New commonality is a clump esthetic consistent with Hofmann's idea that art is, ultimately, joyous--at least in part. For Kuspit, the novel New joys are supremely dialectical: "libido and the death instinct--gloom and glory--fuse."[3] still overall, this is a remarkably ebullient, almost a cheery, exhibition. Despite Kuspit's claims, then, sometimes the of recent origin New give the impression their art is not solidly lower parted in life experience but in playing with paint. greatest in quantity strikingly, Piermarini's Stone in My Heart (1998) with painted forms protruding a lower extremity in front of the canvas, is more comic than convincing.

on the other hand at their best, the fresh New are not merely playful on the contrary inventive. Graham Peacock's method of pouring single layer of paint over another not-quite-cured layer bring forwards a crackle or "crazing," and a fusion of colors, that is central to his accomplishment in stone Silver (1996-97), with its Whistlerian palette and real personal response to nature. Joseph Drapell's notched paint-spreading device has firing materialed his creativity in Gates of Life (1998) where the motility of his sumptuous color is pay backed consistent with a noble lay down to rest Marjorie Minkin's layered, undulating, irregular sheets of the industrial plastic Lexan in Strata (1993) present the appearance as Scott observes, "more iced than painted" and simultaneously summon the human figure, abstracted caryatids, and stone formations sculpt by dint of wind and water.[4] Anne depressed shows a particular gift for monochrome and her have quite personal version of indeterminate space in Jumpstart and Short Circuit (both 1997) Among the younger artists, Roy Lerner who is engaged with the pair jazz (Miles Davis) and southerly American tapestries, generates rich visual complexity in Rhapsody upon the Phone (1995).