Search Results for "label/abstract painting"

Ideas about Painting

How the term “zombie formalism” killed the next generation

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In 2014, a single phrase reshaped the trajectory of contemporary abstract painting. When the late Walter Robinson – painter, critic, and veteran of the Pictures Generation – coined the derogatory term “zombie formalism” in an essay for Artspace, he set off a chain reaction that would stigmatize a generation of young abstract artists and cast a long shadow over abstraction in general. More than a decade later, the story of zombie formalism reads as a pungent example of aesthetic cynicism and jadedness – a case study in how criticism, commerce, and cultural anxiety can converge to distort and ultimately damage an entire movement.

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Solo Shows

Ted Stamm’s conceptual adventurism

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / When Ted Stamm’s career was cut short by his death at age 39 in 1984, he had already begun to attract attention in the United States and internationally. Critics including Edit deAk, Peter Frank, Robert Morgan, and Kay Larson recognized Stamm’s ability to bridge formal rigor with playful urban references. In 1975, deAk wrote in Artforum that “Stamm’s work confounds its own apparent simplicity; the shape’s tense complexity and stubborn definition of itself make it totally the artist’s like an insignia. The color is equally personal, and the painting’s presence is quietly assertive. This is certainly not the elegant nihilism of reductive solutions.” Conceptual endeavors were central to his ambition of making the border between art and everyday life porous.

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Solo Shows

Diebenkorn at Gagosian: A remarkable curatorial accomplishment 

Contributed by David Carrier / For a long time, I have always thought of Richard Diebenkorn as a great painter. A couple of his paintings were in my local museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where I treasured seeing them. But he was, so I believed, someone whose development was straightforward, even a little boring. I arrived at Gagosian’s large upstairs gallery on Madison Avenue with low expectations of a thick array of Diebenkorns in that one room. Maybe it had been a mistake, inspired by misguided nostalgia, to take on this assignment. In the event, the exhibition was revelatory, holding me spellbound. This is one reason why I love being an art critic – the surprise.

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Museum Exhibitions

Jo Baer: Space, position, and light

Contributed by David Carrier / Five smallish early Jo Baer paintings are on display in one white- walled gallery at DIA Beacon in her exhibition there since 2022. The show is both tantalizing and exasperating. In the 1970s, Baer became famous as a minimalist painter. Then she left New York, published a manifesto in 1983 proclaiming “I am no longer an abstract artist,” and changed her style completely.

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Studio Visit

Elisabeth Condon: Beautiful complexity

Contributed by Sharon Butler / To understand Elisabeth Condon’s paintings, it seems important to know that she grew up in California in a highly decorated house where she spent hours staring at the wild patterns of the fabrics and wallpapers. The experience certainly informs her exuberant paintings, in which pattern, flower, landscape all co-exist, as she says in her artist statement, in living, breathing presence.

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Studio Visit

Lisa Hoke’s unconfined vision

Restricted to her studio during lockdown and cut off from large spaces in which to create site-specific work, Lisa Hoke felt the need to fashion pieces that were more portable and more presumptively permanent. What resulted is a scintillating revelation.

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Museum Exhibitions

Surface, flourish, complexity at the Hessel Museum

Contributed by Anne Swartz / Since its origins in the 1970s, practitioners and advocators of the Pattern and Decoration movement have countered claims that decorative art lacked seriousness. In America at the time, critical arguments focused on the exhaustion of painting, positioning it as an outmoded visual form. Several artists resisted this affront. Instead, they embraced images for their pleasure, opposing the notion of immediacy often considered synonymous with other mediums such as photography.

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