Today, artists who work in paint — and paint alone — seem like relics, akin to folksy storytellers in an internet-saturated era. Even the great living painters, the Rosenquists and Richters, knowingly engage in a tradition whose death has been one of acquiescence, museum-encased in a media too thoroughly canonized. Boardrooms and coffee shops will still need something to hang on their walls, sure, but how many creative young upstarts would confine their artwork to the antiquated form of paint on canvas?
Thirty or forty years ago the “death” of painting after late modernist abstraction instigated an impasse that challenged painters to re-envision new possibilities for their genre. Some painters produced works that introduced a new historicity into their art while others investigated the stylistic interplay between representational discourses.
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