Entries (RSS) Painting People
After a century in which the lexicon of artists’ materials expanded from oil, canvas, stone and plaster to include photography, film, performance, found objects, and concepts, the spotlight has finally swung back. A new generation of artists – as well as those who never abandoned figurative painting – is relishing the solitary, slow, subtle set of processes involved in not just painting, but painting people. They are choosing paint’s unique ability to distill a lifetime of events rather than photography’s glimpse of a frozen moment. Painting People, edited by the prominent London art historian and critic Charlotte Mullins, unites and contrasts the work of a key group of artists form around the world, in investigates their richly varied accomplishments with detailed commentaries that are accompanied by more than 200 reproductions of work primarily made within the past six years. More than eighty established and emerging artists are featured, ranging from photo-based painters like Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas, and photorealists such as Gerard Richter, to Pop artist Alex Katz. Paintings by Neo Expressionists like Cecily Brown and Dana Schutz are explored along side comic-inspired images by Yoshitomo Nara, Inka Essenhigh and Takashi Murakami. There are erotic grotesques from John Currin, Jenny Saville and Lisa Yuskavage, cinematic narratives by Eric Fischl, mediations on the muse by Elizabeth Peyton and Lucian Freud, and self-portraits by Phillip Akkerman and Marcel Dzama. |
