This show proves painting is in rude health in the 21st century
Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium
Like news of Mark Twain’s demise, reports of the death of painting have, it seems, been greatly exaggerated. People have been proclaiming its extinction for almost two centuries: upon seeing a daguerreotype for the first time, the French painter Paul Delaroche supposedly declared, “From today, painting is dead!” And how can it possibly compete in the 21st century when billions of photographs are uploaded to the internet every day?
Well, emphatically, it can, as a recent spate of shows, such as the Hayward’s current touring exhibition,
Slow Painting, insists. And the truth is that painters such as Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas achieved international prominence throughout the Nineties and Noughties. So the claim made by a new exhibition of contemporary painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London – that figurative painting is having its first significant “moment” since the Royal Academy’s landmark
New Spirit in Painting show of 1981 – does not really bear scrutiny. Despite the advent of photography and cinema, installation and conceptual art, smartphones and social media, painting has never really gone away.
Still, don’t let marketing hype deter
you from Radical Figures: Painting in
the New Millennium, because visiting proves to be a thoroughly intoxicating experience. Inevitably, the selection feels a little scattershot, in that another curator, on another day, could have picked an entirely different line-up of 10 contemporary painters to attest the medium’s rude health. Moreover, it’s hard to divine what, if anything, unites everyone here. Like the huddle of monstrous figures in Dana Schutz’s Suspicious Minds (2019), which appears upstairs, these artists may be grouped together under the “figurative” umbrella – but, as terms go, that’s pretty broad.
Besides, the show begins, perversely, with a group of powerful yet seemingly abstract canvases by the British painter Cecily Brown
(b. 1969). Peer hard enough, though, at her explosive flicks of paint, and body parts eventually materialise. Are these painters even a generation? Yes and no: half were born in the Eighties, but there are several older, more established names, too, including Daniel Richter and Nicole Eisenman, as well as Brown.
But enough carping: there is lots of strong, memorable work here. Where the Whitechapel may have a point is that many of these artists twist and distort the human figure (or, in Brown’s case, almost obliterate it altogether). Schutz’s Imagine You
and Me (2018) is like a surrealistic reworking of The Owl and the Pussycat, with doe-eyed Easter Island statues for protagonists, afloat on a pea-green sea. But see also the potbellied, balding men who populate Iranian-born Tala Madani’s casually scabrous, cartoonlike tiny oil paintings (they’re brilliant), or the elastic bodily forms in Christina Quarles’s acrylics, stretched and squished into impossible acrobatics. By comparison, Kenyan-born Michael Armitage, an artist I admire, whose paintings, on coarse east African bark cloth, are obviously inspired by late-19th-century art, is made to look earnest and conventional.
Yes, artists have been doing similar things for decades but, somehow, in our narcissistic, airbrushed era of Photoshop and picture-perfect selfies, this latest wave of Neo-expressionism has added force. Besides, what does it matter if these artists are indebted to the past? Painters have always engaged in dialogue with their predecessors, and so it proves here.
Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008) is hipster New York’s answer to Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862). Richter’s fabulous, and prescient, Tarifa (2001) is a homage to great 19th-century European shipwreck paintings by Delacroix and Gericault. Schutz is obsessed with Goya’s sonmunching Saturn. Armitage directly quotes Velázquez. Ryan Mosley – whose Cave Inn (2011), with its moody midnight palette of purple, indigo, and bottle-green, is another highlight – once even worked as a guard at the National Gallery; a re-creation, here, of his studio wall covered with his favourite postcards reveals superb taste. Spotting all the allusions, engaging in these artists’ sophisticated games, is part of the fun.
Not every work is a success, by any stretch. But if you have even half an interest in contemporary painting, Radical Figures should transport you to a very happy place.