Special edition: Painting Forever
Launched in Miami during Art Basel and now available worldwide, Painting Forever is a special edition of KALEIDOSCOPE entirely dedicated to the past, present and future of the medium. The most persistent of art forms—one that was once given up for dead, then revived and is now more alive than ever—painting has been at the core of an intense research process that we undertook in collaboration with writers, curators and artists of different origins, beliefs and generations, all of whom share a desire to examine its history and envision its forthcoming possibilities. The questions we asked, and asked ourselves, were: Which artists are practicing painting in a relevant way today? Which conceptual and formal strategies, which modes of presentation and diffusion, do they deploy? And, ultimately, why? What are contemporary painters’ motives, references and perspectives? This issue is the tentative answer, and one which will hopefully foster further debate.
In the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS, we introduce you to the work of five emerging artists: Oscar Murillo, Ryan Sullivan, Allison Katz, Jonathan Binet and Tala Madani. All born in the 1980s in different parts of the world, they’ve chosen to explore, celebrate and challenge the idea and practice of painting, with a common spirit of engagement and varying degrees of irony and irreverence.
The MAIN THEME section, on the other hand, consists of extensive conversations with four artists born between the 1950s and ’60s—Heimo Zoberning, John Currin, Amy Sillman and Michael Krebber—who represent divergent yet equally prominent and visionary approaches to the medium. Their common ground most revealingly lies in the influence they exert on a younger generation of artists. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that three of them hold teaching positions at eminent art schools, including the Academy of Fine Arts in Wien, Columbia University in New York and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
The MONO section in this issue is likewise devoted to a painter, Los Angeles-based artist Dianna Molzan, whose practice occupies the liminal space between two-and three-dimensionality, between “pictures” and “objects,” and whose works convey a sophisticated research on abstraction encompassing elements drawn from the history of painting, as well as from design, fashion and visual culture at large.
Our section of REGULARS features the work of New York-based artist Nikolas Gambaroff and of Italian conceptualist Giorgio Griffa, alongside discussions with the director of FABA, a prestigious foundation dedicated to the legacy of Pablo Picasso, and the curators of Painter Painter, an ambitious group exhibition soon to open at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Finally, this issue is enriched with commissioned INSERTS by three exciting young artists—Marieta Chirulescu, Fredrik Værslev and Keegan McHargue—that have each contributed a unique and affecting visual take on the making and experiencing of painting today.
KALEIDOSCOPE is an international quarterly of contemporary art and culture founded in 2009 in Milan. Distributed worldwide on a seasonal basis, it has gained widespread recognition as a trusted and timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures) with an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.
KALEIDOSCOPE is distributed by Antenne (Europe), Les Presses du Réel (France), Textfield and Ubiquity (USA).
