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Painting’s Evolution in the Digital Age

A new exhibition explores how painting has responded to mass media.
Nicole Eisenman, Beer Garden with Ash, 2009. All images courtesy of Museum Brandhorst

With this decade’s explosion and rapid branching of new media art forms, we can sometimes forget about contemporary painting, which over the last 100 years has survived and responded in interesting ways to the proliferation of mass media. When painting was threatened by photography and then motion pictures, painters responded experimentally with the cubist, futurist, dada, surrealist and other artistic movements. Each time its death is predicted or assumed, painting rises again.

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The new exhibition, Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst, highlights the evolution of painting through the rise of other mass media, including comics, television, video games and perhaps most powerful of all, the internet. Museum Brandhorst’s Tonio Kröner, assistant curator of the exhibit, recently dove into the ideas and art behind the exhibition with The Creators Project.

Albert Oehlen, Easter Nudes, 1996 

“The show is based on the resurgent interest in painting within the last years, not only in the art market but as well in art schools,” Kröner says. “For years it was not the easiest choice for a young artist to choose painting. Now it seems (again) as a discursive field worth taking up.”

In creating Painting 2.0, Kröner says that the museum proposed several “pre-stories” to this contemporary interest in painting and its relation to changes the latest technological developments have had on our images of subjectivity, protest, body and community. The exhibition begins with work from around 1960, a year that Kröner characterizes as a crucial time for modern art. This was a time when high modernism, exemplified by abstract expressionism and its ideas of “autonomy, immediacy and freedom,” came under pressure.

Matt Mullican, Untitled (Signs), 1981

“New technologies like television and its effects, like pop culture, challenged modern painting,” Kröner says. “Artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Eva Hesse, Lee Lozano and Yves Klein took up this challenge. They combined the visual vocabulary of modernist art with the images and challenges of the society of the spectacle.”

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When the exhibition’s curators say “the society of spectacle”, they are referring to the Situationist theorist Guy Debord’s book of the same name, published in 1967. The spectacle, as Debord saw it, was a byproduct of the mass media—a series of shallow, mesmerizing illusions that basically stunned the masses into cultural, political and economic submission.

Guyton Walker, untitled installation

“If one wants to break it down, Debord discards painting as bourgeois and fetishized commodity, which makes it part of the spectacle’s illusion,” Kröner says. “But he has an ambivalent side to painting as well. For example, his books “Fin de Copenhague” (1957) and “Mémoires” (1959) were made in collaboration with the painter Asger Jorn and use the classic modernist drips of color prominently as means of composition.”

“This ambivalence, to argue against and for painting at the same time, is one of the exhibition's core themes,” Kröner adds. “The interesting thing is, that painting itself seems to offer a stage to reflect upon latest changes in technology and media, maybe as a result of all the debates and challenges it survived. That makes it possible to address the digital age through painting in very different ways.”

Isa Genzken, Wind II (Michael Jackson), 2009

Kröner calls painting a “cyborg of sorts.” As a medium, it seems able to simultaneously embrace both new media art and analogue approaches and bring them into a state of friction.

And what of the future of painting? Kröner says that painting is already in direct conversation with art works which are being labeled “post-internet,” but which might also be discussed with the term “media art.”

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At the Painting 2.0 exhibit.  

“If one likes to think in modes of cycles, painting could also face these challenges from renewed forms of institutional critique and practices that focus on public and global art,” Kröner says. “It will be interesting to see how the stage that painting offers can contribute to these questions."

Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age runs until April 30, 2016 at Museum Brandhorst. To learn more, click here.

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