Alison M. Gingeras
Autor de Guy Bourdin
Sobre El Autor
Obras de Alison M. Gingeras
Cher peintre... / Lieber Maler... / Dear Painter... : Peinture figuratives depuis l'utime Picabia (French Edition) (2002) 16 copias
Mapping the Studio: Artisti dalla collezione Francois Pinault/ Artists from the Francois Pinault Collection/ Aristes de… (2009) 10 copias
New Images of Man 4 copias
The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up 1 copia
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- female
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 23
- Miembros
- 195
- Popularidad
- #112,377
- Valoración
- 3.8
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 20
- Idiomas
- 4
The exhibition "Dear Painter, Paint Me …" borrows its title from Martin Kippenberger’s polemic 1981 series for which the artist commissioned a professional poster painter for one year to translate photographs selected by him into large-format pictures. This subtle play with the role of the painter illustrates how ambiguous, deceptive, and pliable pictures have become in today’s mass media world. Kippenberger’s skeptical radical view of the concept of authenticity in realistic painting outlines an attitude which the artists of this exhibition share.
Highlighting 18 artistic positions from 1940 until today, "Dear Painter, Paint Me …" fathoms the role and range of figurative painting. The exhibition begins with the heydays of doubting realistic modes of representation, the early years of European fascism. Intense correspondences between the members of the Frankfurt School driven into exile in the mid-thirties initiated a debate which established an opposition between the possibilities of a critical realism and the project of modernity. It was in those days that Francis Picabia, undoubtedly a protagonist of the avant-garde, began to paint colorful realistic pictures with a kitschy tenor, using erotic magazines such as "Mon Paris" and "Paris Sex Appeal" as his source. Picabia’s bent for an apparently anti-modernist figurative art of portrayal in the academic style was considered an affront.
With these pictures as a starting-point, the exhibition continues with a loose sequence of four other historical positions, each of which marks a radical attitude of the post-war era. All of them go to prove that a leaning towards figurative painting does not necessarily imply a retreat to traditional forms of realistic depiction.
The second part of the presentation following Picabia’s "Nudes" (1940-3) spans from a group of austere nudes, portraits, and self-portraits by Bernard Buffet (1949-65) which, aimed against the academism of the Ecole de Paris, center on "academic" subjects, and four crucial pictures by Sigmar Polke (from the early 60s) for "the capitalist realism" that parody the alienation effect of the consumer culture to a selection of large-format group portraits by Alex Katz (from the 70s), pictures revealing the filter of the distanced view of sociological cinema, and a presentation of works by Martin Kippenberger (from the 80s) that illustrate the artist’s refusal to see himself categorized as belonging to a specific artistic or political group.
These historical positions lead to thirteen other artists’ works from the past decade’s scene. Their views are characterized by a digestion of the historical positions’ formal and conceptual strategies. All of them radically abandon the traditional art of portrayal by making pictures of the human subject the starting-point of their approach. The artists almost never depart from the real subject as their model but rather rely on photographs, films, TV pictures, the press, and the canon of art history or base their constructions on fictitious figures of the prevailing visual and social codes. The artists assembled in the show are far from believing in the often proclaimed impending death of figurative painting but consider the figurative as a source of freedom in view of the dogmas of history. "Dear Painter, Paint Me …" demonstrates that figurative painting is not only full of vitality but may also convey conceptual contents and be a source of visual pleasure at the same time.… (más)