Painter Painter
February 2–October 27, 2013
Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403
T +1 612 375 7600
At a time when artists may work without obligation to medium, why choose the materials of painting? What does it mean for an artist to assume the role of painter today? And just what is at stake for a new generation committed to painting?
This exhibition presents new work by 15 artists from the US and Europe in a focused survey of some emergent developments in abstract painting and studio practice. With an expanded series of public programs, it also considers the ever-shifting role of the painter in contemporary art and culture, which remains as fluid as the medium itself.
For the participating artists, painting is a means, not an end—a generative process rooted in the studio yet open and receptive to the world. With a fascination for the medium’s many histories, they freely pursue new vocabularies of abstraction and eccentric methods of making. Questions of form and process find a more distributed context than ever before, as this generation of artists embraces an ever-expanding network of references and influences. Drawing into the studio aspects of music, design, literature, performance, philosophy, and visual culture, they filter their wide-ranging interests through abstraction. By engaging painting’s history, conventions, and critical debates on their own terms, they insist that the role of the painter is open to interpretation and reinvention. Indeed, the simple repetition in the show’s title is meant to signal the term’s fluidity, as these artists recast its various meanings in our present moment.
The Walker’s first group painting show in more than a decade, the exhibition features Matt Connors, Sarah Crowner, Fergus Feehily, Jay Heikes, Rosy Keyser, Charles Mayton, Dianna Molzan, Joseph Montgomery, Katy Moran, Alex Olson, Scott Olson, Zak Prekop, Dominik Sittig, Lesley Vance, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.
As a complement to the exhibition, a series of online Studio Sessions with the artists offers an open-ended look at their interests and working methods. As varied in approach as the work of the artists themselves, this collection of dialogues, texts, and visual essays will roll out over the course of the exhibition.
Painter Painter is curated by Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan, Assistant Curators, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.
Acknowledgements
Major support for the exhibition is provided by Martha and Bruce Atwater. Additional support is generously provided by Jean Walker Lowell and Wayne Lowell, The McKnight Foundation, and Michael J. Peterman and David A. Wilson.
