David Risley Gallery

“Surely you don’t think that a stupid demonstration of

brushwork, or of the rhetoric of painting and its

elements, could ever achieve anything, say anything,

express any longing.”

Gerhard Richter, Interview with Benjamin Buchloh 1986.

Arthur C. Danto said in a panel discussion in 2003 that the

late eighties “…‘Death of Painting’ was in part an expression

of ressentiment against the painting that was causing so much

excitement in the early '80s, neo-expressionism. But it seems

evident that the target must have been, in part, the form of

life in which the affluence of the Reagan years expressed

itself in collecting art, in ‘getting in on the ground floor’

through acquiring paintings that were certain to appreciate in

the way that Abstract Expressionist paintings had done--so

that ‘bad painting’ was a kind of willed uglification, a

refusal to be complicit in the agenda of painting-as-luxury. I

am not a social historian, but it seems to me, if I am right

in these speculations, that the true art history of the '80s

has not yet begun to be addressed.”

Taking as its title Paul McCarthy's mantra from his 1995 video

'Painter', this group show of painting looks at the difficult

task of still making an expressive genre of painting which

both looks back to the problematic period of 1980's Neo

Expressionism and re-examines the legacy of the expressionist

gesture in painting now.