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It would not be an overstatement to say that this is the most “abstract” issue of New American Paintings we have published in a number of years. For anyone who even casually follows the ebbs and flows of the art world, it would be obvious that figurative painting has been all the rage for close to a decade. I think this has much to do with the state of the world throughout that period of time, one where we have all had to grapple with economic uncertainty, racial injustice, a pandemic, multiple wars, and a myriad of other issues that have proven to be difficult and distracting. During such times, it’s not surprising to see that many contemporary artists turn to the body as a locus of both trauma and healing. The world’s problems have not disappeared, but more and more painters now seem comfortable working with the many languages of abstractions and, as you will find in the pages herein, often to great effect.

New American Paintings is now in its thirtieth year of circulation. As I write these words, we are in the middle of a complex technological upgrade, the front-facing side of which will be made manifest with the relaunch of our website: newamericanpaintings.com.

A lot of thought has gone into the construction of the new site; after all, New American Paintings has always served the needs of two very distinct audiences: artists and art enthusiasts. For artists, especially our alumni, the upgraded website offers a number…

What do you see when you spend time with a series of paintings, all devoid of context and anonymously authored? To be honest, it’s not something I often have the opportunity to do, so the process of intaking such a range of contemporary painting practices prompted some productive musings on the various approaches and helped me question some of my own assumptions about the state of painting.

As I processed I kept returning to specific words and their slippery definitions—in particular, “abstraction.” I was confused, however, about why that word kept coming to mind as I viewed paintings of people, animals, and objects, tradition-ally more representational subjects. I realized that my confusion arose because I was defining “abstraction” as oppositional to “representation,” a viewpoint held through the lineage of art history that broadly characterizes abstraction as separate and outside of lived experience. Within this binary the term seemed oppressive, as what I felt from the paintings was something actually quite expansive, personal, and indeed, abstracted. For me, the word becomes a more helpful tool for understanding when detached from its supposed antonym and instead, considered an act or process of removal from context, rather than from reality or the personal. This act, in fact, was recurrent throughout many of the works I viewed. What I saw were the ways that artists use expansive ideas of abstraction to achieve a sense of clarity and how they use reality to highlight its own abstraction.

One place in this issue to start is…