Sterling Ruby

January 05, 2015, 1:25pm

NAP Contributor Top 5: Erin Langner

On the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s show, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl recently wrote of painting being in a state of crisis. In response to the show comprised of painters whose “approach characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of the new millennium,” according to MOMA’s website, Schjeldahl rejects the medium’s outright death. Still unoptimistic, he concludes, “Painting can bleed now, but it cannot heal.”

As someone who has spent a lot of time with paintings over the last few years, I had to stop to consider whether I agreed: are the paintings I have encountered bleeding? In trying to answer, I found myself making my list of the five shows that made me think the most about the state of painting this year—its physicality, its lasting presence, and its bloodshed. — Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor


Sterling Ruby | SUNRISE SUNSET installation view, image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Listed under: Art World, Noteworthy

July 27, 2012, 8:30am

Who is the most significant painter to emerge since 2000? (Poll)

So you don’t believe in miracles? Think about this: Painting has been pronounced clinically dead dozens of times, and, like Lazarus, it keeps coming back for more. It is the medium that simply refuses to die.

The 1990s were a tough decade for painting, as video, installation, and, in particular, photography, relegated it to the margins of the art world’s often too narrow field of vision. But as the 2000s began, the oldest of mediums returned with a vengeance. Impressively, it has continued to be the dominant medium for more than a decade, first with an explosion of figurative work in the early 2000s, and now with an extreme focus on abstraction.

Listed under: Poll

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