Press

This issue of Flash Art, with its special emphasis on painting, comes at a moment when the medium is unwilling to conform to the cycle of its periodically proclaimed death and re-birth, appearing to have died but to be carrying on regardless. Almost without doubt, a major factor in the current predominance of the medium has been the rise to prominence of the Leipzig and Dresden ‘schools’. In this issue, Johannas Schmidt offers a comprehensive assessment of current and recent practices in these cities. Across Europe, in the United States, and further a field, a peculiar climate seems to be forming in which the figurative and abstract are no longer rivals, surface and subject matter are no longer wary of each other, where intellect and sentiment find themselves unlikely bedfellows, and in which the ashamedly ugly and the decidedly beautiful have lost their inhibitions and are eager to intermingle. Indeed the British context is presently described as a state of ‘fever’ by JJ Charlesworth in this essay for Flash Art on current painting in London.

The diversity of practice attracting attention suggests there has been a certain relaxation of the unwritten conventions determining what is desired from current painting - the academic painter and the most radical practitioner feeling equally comfortable with navigating the idiosyncratic relationships that are developing between previously clearly differentiated domains. Perhaps artists, critics, curators, and collectors alike are enjoying a sense of freedom, liberated from the shackles of theory, which had seemed so heavy in the mid ’90s – a freedom that will perhaps allow for a reconfiguration of their relationship to theory, as discussed this issue in Lane Relyea’s essay ‘Painting and Theory’.

There is certainly a sense of a renewed openness to 20th –century styles, genres, and movements among young painters in their search for new languages , matched by an enthusiastic reception for it by their audience. The revisionism this has already triggered within curating suggests that the boundaries between the conservative and the progressive are, at least for the time being, diminishing – the fashionable in flirting fearlessly with the unfashionable and the process of convergence is a source of energy driving much of the most exciting painting of today.

Matt Price

Artists Profiled

Kamrooz Aram Abel Auer Kristin Baker Hernan Bas Whitney Bedford Simone Berti Lise Blomberg Andersen Jesse Bransford Koen Van Den Broek Rafal Bujnowski Gillian Carnegie Jennifer Coates Amy Cutler Kaye Donachie Benjamin Edwards Tom Fabritius Dee Ferris Michael Fullerton Torben Giehler Tina Gillen Andrew Guenther Terry Haggerty Thoralf Knobloch Martin Kobe Ulrich Lamsfuss Rezi Van Lankveld Graham Little Jorg Lozek Dietmar Lutz Marcin Maciejowski Cameron Martin Manu Muniategiandikoetxea Antonio Olaio Christopher Orr Paul P. Graham Parks Toby Paterson

Alex Pollard Brighton, 1977. Lives in Glasgow. ‘The continued fascination for painting in the world is perhaps a reaction against contemporary culture’s obsession with what is real. I find it interesting to think of painting as a language that might say something about life through fictions.’ (Alex Pollard)

Tyson Reeder Amselm Reyle Zbigniew Rogalski Christoph Ruckhaberle Wilhelm Sasnal Sopia Schama Christoph Schellberg Maja Vukoje Gunnel Wahlstrand Matthias Weischer Akira Yamaguchi Ethienne Zack Kevin Zucker