I remember on several occasions, either when you came over for a studio visit, or when you were in attendance at an exhibition of mine, you told me, “I hate you,” which was your manner of delivering a compliment. I knew what you really meant was that you saw something recognizably good in the work, and that you found it to be particularly challenging.
Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, and a general cultural malaise that has lingered since the 1990s.
Gagosian announces thematic group exhibition in collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch artdaily.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from artdaily.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
These works’ pictorial strategies, and others from the 1970s on, though their initial effects are still op, align them with many of the now marginalized practices of post-50s hardedge and geometric abstract art. With this insight, I realized Riley’s practice extends beyond her association with Op art and that her work can be contextualized within the broader aesthetic discourses of early and late modernism.
Milwaukee Art Museum will show Art, Life, Legacy: Northern European Paintings in the Collection of Isabel and Alfred Bader, which opens Sept. 29, and 50 Paintings, a survey of work by 50 contemporary painters, starting Nov. 17.