In the middle of the middle are two greats as well, though perhaps a smidge less established, Rashid Johnson and Mary Weatherford. This includes the doubling of Charline von Heyl and Amy Sillman, in their excerpted mastery, at opposite ends of the middle section. To keep going backward through this attempted, atemporal space, the work expands and contracts into booths and singular breaths. Owens embeds her work with a childlike joy and irrepressible smirk, inviting you to laugh with her, if you spend the time to get the joke. What sets her work apart in The Forever Now is, perhaps, her seeming disentanglement with the tradition of painting itself, and more her preoccupation with deconstructing the narrative impulse which belies image-making. The paint is goopy, the print is clean, and readability oscillates before your eyes as if your glasses had fogged. To be fair, the three pieces of Owen’s in the show are titled Untitled, and range in ostensive subject matter, but focus on the tokens of early childhood education, such as cursive practice writing pads and 1960s Americana illustration. Her Untitled, the PR image of the entire exhibition, is about 11 ½ by 10 feet, and consists what might be abstracted white flowers on a text-based background, applied so that it seems each layer floats on top of the other, à la Photoshop.
To talk time, Blue Sea Old Wash, located physically at the end, feels like the singularity at the beginning of the Big Bang: lots of heat, small amount of space.Īldrich’s works are coupled with the Tumblresque airbrush canvases of Michael Williams,Īntidote to this numbing immaturity is the sophisticated, darkly humorous, and outright gigantic screen-printed works of Laura Owens. At only 14 ½ by 11 inches, the scarred, monochrome work functions as if to be the absolute reversal of almost everything else in the show. At first look, I thought of Hemingway, and his clean, well-lit space in text.
One of the most powerful works here is his small, unassuming oil and wax on panel, Blue Sea Old Wash (2006). Present are five of the artist’s distinct works, which display his lighthearted grappling of authenticity in gesture and material. Or perhaps, latent, as in the selected work of Richard Aldrich, toward the back of the labyrinthine curation. Present here is a spectrum between representation and pure abstraction, though the representation comes in waves of cartoonish gesture and laden symbolism. In summation, Hoptman’s curatorial postulate allows for a contemporary painting survey, at the Museum of Modern Art, which hasn’t seen one in 30 years. The only obvious string holding them all together is their market bankability, as duly noted in other reviews, and even that leaves one or two outliers. Or, as the press release states, “Their work represents traditional painting, in the sense that each artist engages with painting’s traditions, testing and ultimately reshaping historical strategies like appropriation and bricolage and reframing more metaphysical, high-stakes questions surrounding notions of originality, subjectivity, and spiritual transcendence.” A sketchy premise, but it does allow for a wide range of painters, varying in demographic, method, and medium. The basic premise of the show is that these painters, working now, represent a main, but general, direction of contemporary praxis in which the history of technique and concept are but parallel mines to delve into at will, pulling out golden incentive and inspiration, to the point of replication.
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