Jeff Koons
"They're about the idea of metaphysics, the right-here-right-now, the eternal. In science, we know that in a short period of time you can change your genes, your DNA, through ideas. I know my genes are different since coming across Manet. I'm head-to-toe a different person." - Jeff Koons (Excerpt of a 2015 interview of Jeff Koons by Bill Powers about the Gazing Ball Paintings). The scale of each painting differs from the original, each work is painted on canvas in such a way that the surface is very smooth, and the introduction of a blue glass-blown "gazing ball”—balanced on a shelf that blends into the background—affixed on the canvas allows a simultaneous augmented view of the paintings, the viewer, the room.
Erik Lindman
Erik Lindman eschews traditional easel-style painting, which enables the artist to step back and consider his work from the future spectator’s point of view as he works through a composition. Using tabletops instead, the paintings are seen up close as surfaces, and Lindman begins by incorporating traces of other earlier compositions or found materials, working them into the paintings such that, ultimately, they are subsumed into a seamless layer. The result is a psychological, eidetic experience, similar to how Freud imagined memory as many traces upon a Wunderblock: markings never fully erased, always permanently etched below the surface.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
An interest in synesthesia, the association of rhythms and sound with visual imagery, brought Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s work into the realm of abstraction in the 1950s. He continued to incorporate recognizable imagery in the 1960s, where ocular shapes stand in for human figures. Seeking out universal modes of communication free of personal references, as time went on, he further restricted his color palette and simplified forms. Yet he employed a painterly style, believing that something human, new and unknown, comes through the act of painting in excess of any intention.
Richard Prince
Interview excerpt with Kim Gordon, 2012. PRINCE: Well, the backstory is that they date back to these abstract images I made in 1977. I wanted to update those abstractions (in 2012). My daughter had braces at the time, and I would find these tiny little rubber bands that were always popping out of her mouth. So that gave me an idea. I used the bands to make the letter O. Then I started to write the word "asshole" around that letter, and I decided to call them "the asshole paintings.” That's how it started. (…) And then one day I decided to work with a larger rubber band. (...) I stretched the rubber band I was using and I wanted to make the shape stay, and I realized I couldn't stick it on with paint, that wouldn't hold it, so I just picked up my staple gun and stapled it. The two gestures were married that afternoon. It was kind of a lightbulb moment. And somehow the blackness of the band created a line that didn't look like a rubber band anymore. It became part of the surface. And yes, you're right about the randomness of the shape. It's just whatever. GORDON: Because you know, the last time we met, we were talking about Damien Hirst's dot paintings, and how there are some that are more interesting paintings than others—which sort of defeated his purpose. In a funny way to me, the band paintings are kind of all the same. And they're different.
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel’s painting process like spray paint, for instance, since the 1980s entails innovative approaches to the painting’s surface as departure point in his large-scale, mixed media explorations. His most recent work began with photographs transferred onto polyester using inkjet printing, a technique that imbricates image and fabric as a foundation for large, expressive brushstrokes and abstract, spray-painted marks. These materials also sink intentionally into the fabric, instead of resting traditionally on its surface, so much so that the artist turns over the polyester in the process and often continues the composition backward, to ultimately present the paintings inside out from where they began.
Blair Thurman
Blair Thurman’s “Supermodels” series explores the racecar through shaped paintings in neon colors that resemble a car’s front grill. Thurman’s work is inspired by contemporary culture and tied to earlier modernist tropes and associations in such a way that a neon sign at a sports bar invokes minimalist works by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin. The shaped canvases at once refer to classical interrogations of a painting’s wood and canvas support while at the same time draw out a macho painterly approach to an extreme, producing something new, conflated with so-called “low brow” culture.
Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool employs a paired-down palette, most often reduced to black and white, or one additional color. The chromatic simplicity shifts emphasis to his laborious process: in Untitled (P584) (2009), the composition is produced through hand-drawn, spray-painted lines and brushstrokes that have been cancelled and erased through layers of wash. He produces a flat surface that bears trace of its production, which is, ultimately, the work’s content. The composition is translated into four silkscreened images tiled together onto one canvas, leaving further trace of its making in the subtle shift in tone and the visible hard edges of the silkscreens