Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed
The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.Â
Matt Connors, Divot (2012), via Art Observed)
With a group of seventeen painters, most of whom are from Germany and the United States, the show covers recent developments in multimedia abstraction, while expounding upon the notion of what painting can be in today’s image-saturated world. However, while Hoptman’s guiding principle highlights diversity, the selection seems to place emphasis on derivation, rather than creative innovation, in contemporary practices.
Oscar Murillo at MoMA, via Art Observed
As the curators propose, now more than ever, painters glean inspiration from the vast trove of visual art and broader media subjects available online—an approach that allows for the convergence of diverse styles and the profusion of disparate techniques. Without explicitly using the term “postinternet,†the exhibition extends this catch-all paradigm, reflecting ways in which digital media has transformed our experience of history and the creation/reception of paintings. The networked system’s visual aesthetic, as well as its “atemporality,†pervades the artwork on display here: Laura Owens’s large-scale silkscreen paintings, which mimic pixelated computer screens, Kerstin Brätsch’s glass-encased panels of jagged calligraphic brushstrokes, reminiscent of technological glitches, and Michael Williams’s chaotic canvases, each one brimming with digital icons.
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (Installation View), Courtesy of MoMA
With its mash-up of art historical styles, the exhibition mirrors some of the formal signifiers lambasted as “zombie formalism;” the specters of Abstract Expressionism and Clement Greenberg lurk in the background, evident in the hard-edge work of Matt Connors and the color field–inspired paintings of Mary Weatherford. Oscar Murillo, often placed in the center of such debates, presents a series of folded, unstretched canvases, playfully laid upon the floor, works which encourage participation and directly challenge the presumed sanctity of paintings hung on MoMA’s hallowed walls. Other artists, such as Dianna Molzan, almost do away with the canvas altogether, placing emphasis instead on the crossbeams of the canvas stretcher in a nod to Greenberg’s concept of the frame. Others, still, rebel against the preciousness of painting and toy with notions of “skillâ€: Joe Bradley’s drawings on unprimed canvas, inspired by children’s art, and Josh Smith’s series of vibrant abstract and representational paintings, based on a series of self-imposed constraints, mirror these concepts.
Dianna Molzan, via Art Observed
For all its ambition, the show’s focus leaves much to be desired, and its focus, a nearly inexhaustible artistic medium that continues to unfold, unravel and expand, makes the challenge all the more daunting.  While Hoptman’s exhibition choices undoubtedly strong, social, political and figurative themes are notably downplayed, choices which could have added additional robust commentary to the medium’s already messy, expansive complexity.  One can only hope that MoMA won’t wait another thirty years before presenting another, perhaps more rigorously expansive survey of contemporary painting.
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through April 5, 2015.
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (Installation View), Courtesy of MoMA
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (Installation View), Courtesy of MoMA
—O. Casa
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [The Museum of Modern Art]
“The Paintbrush in the Digital Era” [The New York Times]
“‘The Forever Now’ Is MoMA’s Market Moment” [New York Magazine]
“The Forever Now review: calling time on the avant garde” [The Guardian]
“Take Your Time” [The New Yorker]
