DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning

“Surely you don’t think that a stupid demonstration of brushwork, or of the rhetoric of painting and its elements, could ever achieve anything, say anything, express any longing.” Gerhard Richter, Interview with Benjamin Buchloh 1986.

Arthur C. Danto said in a panel discussion in 2003 that the late eighties “…‘Death of Painting’ was in part an expression of ressentiment against the painting that was causing so much excitement in the early '80s, neo-expressionism. But it seems evident that the target must have been, in part, the form of life in which the affluence of the Reagan years expressed itself in collecting art, in ‘getting in on the ground floor’ through acquiring paintings that were certain to appreciate in the way that Abstract Expressionist paintings had done--so that ‘bad painting’ was a kind of willed uglification, a refusal to be complicit in the agenda of painting-as-luxury. I am not a social historian, but it seems to me, if I am right in these speculations, that the true art history of the '80s has not yet begun to be addressed.”

Taking as its title Paul McCarthy's mantra from his 1995 video 'Painter', this group show of painting looks at the difficult task of still making an expressive genre of painting which both looks back to the problematic period of 1980's Neo Expressionism and re-examines the legacy of the expressionist gesture in painting now.

DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning...
Kurator:Dexter Dalwood

Künstler: Nathan Barlex, Anne Sofie Bird Møller, Stuart Cumberland, Rannva Kunoy, Paul McCarthy, Vanessa Mitter, Jill Mulleady