VITAMIN P - NEW PERSPECTIVES IN PAINTING - first edition, 2002

  

These are the six  artists I selected out of the 114 presented in Phaidon’s “Vitamin P - New Perspectives in Painting”(2002).  Barry Schwabsky was the senior editor of this project, and I wrote about his introduction here .

All 114, except for a few boring minimalists, aimed for the strange, the unexpected, the disconcerting. That’s what contemporary art ( prior to the triumph of identity art)  was supposed to do.  The ones I picked also aimed for the kind of visual intensity that distinguishes the best things in every genre.

None of my six were born before 1960, so that may have been the cut-off.  Artists over forty were not included.  

My own brief comments are offered along with essays published in the book.

 TOMMA ABTS 

B. 1967

Like several interesting painters that have emerged in recent years, Tomma Abts makes seemingly unassuming paintings that provocatively connect to what remain rather weird moments of early twentieth century abstract painting. Much that was abandoned by painters a hundred years ago and that was nearly forgotten is finally available to a new generation. Today's painters do not have to decide that painting must be one thing and not another, or that it must go away entirely. Abts's paintings take what they need from this earlier time when many painters (El Lissitzky and Marcel Duchamp are two famous examples) abandoned the physical and cultural development of painting in midstream in order to figure out how to stop making paintings period. Abts knows that we have no valid reasons to stop making paintings today. We must consider the possibility that her paintings don't look at all nostalgic partially because we've lost our collective memory. Her moderate (almost portrait-like) canvases open up a kind of abstraction that I am tempted to call "new" precisely because of the uniqueness of the elaborate and hard-to-pin-down matrix they create with all of their references. 

 

Tiard, 2000, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches 

000 Abts's paintings wear on their sleeves physical traces of other motifs or structures that were put down at some earlier point during her process. The layering is so obvious (yet not overworked) that it is able to disrupt the longing for an earlier history of these forms by directly acknowledging their own much more recent histories in these particular paintings-right here, right now. The final surface of Tiard (2000), for example, has a set of triangles that fit on (or in) it like a puzzle. Precarious yet perfectly balanced, these triangles are reactivated by a previous triangular pattern of lines that Abts has painted over with a gray background. The fact that this prior design is in relief is telling. In all of Abts's paintings relief functions as a "relief," ridges that become a backup for-and/or a break in-the action.

 000 Abts's color functions in a similar manner. All of her color choices are slightly off and rigorously indefinable: dusty yet clear, faded yet bright, natural yet cultural, here yet over there. The predominately empty center of Eerke (2000), is painted in what should be an easily located light blue. However, a border of jagged teeth-like triangles in gradated shades of darker blue make it impossible to decide if they are in front of this light background (they could have cast shadows) or if that background is in fact entirely on top of a darker blue field. Even Welf (2001), which is dominated by a rather symbolic central form (sort of almond-shaped with wings), does not succumb to an easy figure/ ground relationship. Finally, not that we really need them, but even Abts's titles participate in this very productive lack-of-knowing: Pabe (2000); Jurke (2000); Koene (2001); Hillo (2001). We may not have a clue where we are, but Abts's paintings make it clear that it is a dynamic place.

 000 Terry R. Myers , Independent curator and critic, Los Angeles

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Apparently Myers’s read Schwabsky’s introduction.  He has dutifully applied its premise (painting versus conceptual) to  tell us that Abts “knows that we have no valid reasons to stop making paintings today.”.  He tells us her work is a dialog with the history of Modern art.  He never tells us how it makes him feel. He never identifies it’s extraordinary visual quality.

Welf, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches 

Lewe, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches 

Hillo, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 × 15 inches 

Detail

Epko, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 × 15 inches 

Koene, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches 

 I saw the Tomma Abts show in 2019 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and reviewed it  here

She’s an ice queen - but also an endless spigot of precision and invention - with luminous qualities that do not translate well to the computer screen. Not sure I would have chosen her solely on the basis of the above images.

Saske, 2024, acrylic on bronze in two parts, 19 x 15

Here’s some of her recent work.

Endless exploration within her chosen, limited domain.

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FRANZ ACKERMANN 

B. 1963

 

Helicopter XVI (the invitation), 2001, Oil on canvas, 108 x 216 inches,

Inside the Bullet, 2001, Mixed media on paper, 12 x 15 inche

Bologna, 2000, Acrylic on wood, Installation at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy 

Untitled (mental map: in the jungle), 1997, Mixed media on paper, 10 × 13 inches, 

The above works did not interest me as much as the 2022 works shown below:

These have an explosive, disruptive, cheerful quality i so enjoy.

Like graffiti or comic books - but able to sustain repeated viewing.

Franz Ackermann's brightly colored and dynamic paint ings embody the chaos and flux of cities in today's increasingly globalized society. Surging architectural forms suggest the numerous physical, social, political, economic, and ethnic upheavals that have characterized urban centers over the past decade. The fluid shifts of color and structure in Ackermann's images gives them a protean corporeality, making his cityscapes appear to be living, breathing, and organic entities. His work reflects, to some degree, the welter of building activity, economic fluctuation, and cultural readjustment in his home base of Berlin since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany. His project is based on his personal experience of travel (beginning in Hong Kong after his graduation from art school), with his paintings and works on paper serving as subjective diagrams and cursory impressions of various cities. 000 Ackermann's early works on paper, the "Mental Maps, "are small condensations of transitory impressions of a particular location into a skewed cartographic abstraction. This process mirrors the universal tendency to "map" a city according to one's personal relationships with neighborhoods, buildings, and streets. In a sense, the "Mental Maps" emerge from the tradition of the flâneur, a solitary figure (memorably conceived in the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) who silently observes the goings-on of the street from a detached point view. Ackermann's visual perspective on the city is more bird's-eye than street-level, yet his odd subtitles-Private Sector, Just Another Place for Riots, and I couldn't find a bar-indicate a more intimate and earthbound stream of consciousness. 000 Like many artists of his generation, Ackermann is incredibly (and increasingly) mobile, working on numerous pro jects in various locations. The swirling combination of culturally specific motifs and structures in his larger "Evasions" paintings and in his complex architectural installations draws on this sense of motion and itinerancy. Ackermann's incorporation of the wall to present lattices and patterns of interconnected lines makes other forms of global dispersal and interconnectivity -namely the Internet-visually manifest in his depiction of the heightened density of cultural exchange. In his 1998 project Songline at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, for example, he employed passageways, wall dividers, cul-de-sacs, and reflective surfaces to create the illusion of being immersed in one of the painted scenarios. The inclusion of a blown-up photo mural of a street riot added to the visual array and combined with similarly political images to recreate the overwhelming experience of abstractions and polemics that characterizes urban life in the twenty-first century. 000 Ackermann's recent work continues to reframe and reposition the overlapping images, associations, and memories that clutter the vision of the frequent flyer, the Internet surfer, and the contemporary flaneur. His exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in 2000, "B.I.T. (Back in Town)" , dealt with tourism's movement and displacement of people through a combination of abstract wall-paintings and travel agency images. Ackermann reverses the sentiment of the song "At Home He's a Tourist" by the punk rock quartet Gang of Four, embodying an ethos closer to "He's at Home as a Tourist." Painting urban worlds in collision, Ackermann observes that we are lost amid the dizzying display of changing pictures and words and the new ideas that they represent in our present, hyperglobal situation. 000 Dominic Molon 

For me, these images themselves are the trip - rather than references to one. The above text would link this artist to the many early modernists who were also enthralled  yet disoriented in response to modern urban life. Can we call this Paleo-Modernism?  It’s still a reasonable response to the world.

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PETER DOIG

B. 1959

100 Years Ago, 2001, Oil on canvas, 94 × 141 inches

Daytime Astronomy, 1997-8, Oil on canvas, 78 × 110 inches

Night Playground, 1997-8, Oil on canvas, 78 × 108 inches

Figure in Mountain Landscape, 1997-8, Oil on canvas, 114 1/4 × 78 3/4 inches

House of Pictures, 2000, Oil on canvas, 78 × 108 inches,

Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, 2001, Oil on canvas, 78 × 108 inches

These pieces are so quirky and puzzling, why bother? Yet something about them won’t let go.

As the artist has put it: 

 "I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words”

Outside of advertising or propaganda, Art should be questionable because that’s how the world is - but as a goal,  that’s a pretty low bar to clear..

I am attracted as well as disappointed.

Doig is good, but overrated.

Here’s a more recent example’

 Peter Doig makes some of his most explicitly "banded paintings to date: roughly dividing the landscape-format canvases into three horizontal strips. "I did like the idea," the artist has said, "that maybe these sections which had opened up to reveal a strip of existence could just as easily close down again." In these recent paintings the upper and lower bands work quite seamlessly as sky or foreground-providing a deep satisfaction for the eye and mind. They do, however, demand to be read as abstract, so free are they of the detail and painterly vitality of earlier works. The paint is now almost gruel thin. This tension in Doig's work between abstraction and representation, noted before by numerous critics, has rarely been so manifest. 000 It is as if an abstract painting has split open to reveal an interior world, yet the threat or opportunity for the imminent collapse of the image is always there, as suggested in Doig's statement above. Figuration is there only on suffer]ance, and could vanish at any moment. That which is opened to us for viewing has the character of a dream or vision. These new paintings move away from a reality gleaned from found photographs and personal memories, into a symbolist realm, a mode of landscape painting Doig has inherited from Canada's Group of Seven painters of the 1920s. In the central band of these paintings that Doig has prized open, like Newman's zips, Doig has created a place for the suggestion of the sublime. But this is not Newman's sublime of human emotions; rather, they are directional markers that point to the truly ineffable. House of Pictures, Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, and 100 Years Ago represent a mature Doig grappling with the eternal subjects of life, death, and ultimate unknowableness. 000 Many commentators have talked of Doig's atmospheric and melancholy landscapes. Yet these new works move away from an everyday reality toward a higher plane. In Gasthof, the figures at the gate are welcoming despite their eccentric garb. The bright multicolored stones contribute to a sense of hope and opportunity. The painting extends an invitation to walk down that path with those strange men, and to encounter another realm beyond the edge of the painting. The central band in the painting therefore becomes the locus of sight, imagination, and hope, but it is also the entrance to the sublime and the unknowable. 000 In House of Pictures, the focus-this time a series of shop windows, which, according to the sign at the top, sells pictures-is once again located in the central band. Not only does the painting offer a Hopperesque inconsequential urban moment, with its attendant existential disquietude, but again refers to the unknowable, those glittering objects that lie beyond the glass within the darkened void. 000 100 Years Ago, is one of Doig's most reductive and unforgiving paintings to date. Compared with works from the previous decade the composition is harsh and simple, the paint thin. The recurring canoe motif beloved of Doig is here again inhabited by the figure of now-dead rock musician Berry Oakley, one time bassist for the Allman Brothers. With a mysterious and forbidding island in the distance the painting references the journey across the River Styx, and in particular refers to a classic of Symbolist art, Arnold Böcklin's "Island of the Dead" series. The direct stare of the bearded figure addresses the viewer, who is surely being invited to join him on the final journey. 000 Emma Dexter

Bocklin’s “Island of the Dead”  lives in my imagination forever - Doig’s paintings not so much.

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PIA FRIES 

B. 1955

stockwell, 2001, Oil and silkscreen on wood. diptych, left 31 × 25 inches, right: 31 x 19 

Detail

belsize, 2001-2, Oil and silkscreen on wood, 78 × 102

caspian, 2001-2, Oil and silkscreen on wood, 78 × 102 

Lumnes, 1995-96, 43 x 67 inches

Kopfhas, 2004, 43 x 57

Torino B., 2015, 17 x 21

Grax , 39 x 27, 2006

An alternative reality that appears to be the result of spinning inward and exploding outward at the same time. A world of nonsense and wonder -, just like what Alice found down a rabbit hole. It’s a mind separated from the usual dramas of human life.

 PIA FRIES is one of an emerging generation of painters whose work results from a conceptual and aesthetic wrestling match with Modernist painting, the dominant artistic expression of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is too easy to project Oedipal overtones onto this phenomenon, but in the late 1990s, the question "Is painting dead?" rose (once again) from the grave where it had been buried for twenty years. Displaced in the 1970s as the avant-garde destination of choice by more pluralistic pursuits including sculpture, installation, performance, and transmedia, painting had lost its primacy. Ironically, a generation later, the most advanced and dedicated artists are drawn to painting again, yet rather than celebrating the medium, these artists seem compelled to resurrect it by killing it. 000 Fries unleashes a cacophony of color and texture onto each hard white field to create her sophisticated, energetic paintings. A rigid surface is required for the processes she enacts, so she primes each wood panel with six or seven layers. Fries was trained as a sculptor before shifting to this fluid, flatter medium, so her tools are important, and range from traditional choices such as palette knives, spatulas, and brush- es, to objects foreign to the studio including syringes, industrial instruments, application objects she makes herself. This gives her innumerable methods for manipulating the pure oil paint that she sometimes thickens with resin, sometimes thins with medium, sometimes flatly silk-screens onto the surface. 000 Addition and subtraction are part of a painter's customary process, and in her Düsseldorf studio Fries has several paintings in progress at once. The works evolve organically. "I take my time, " she explains. "I like to step back, reflect, distance myself for the next step and then work again... learning as I go on." The eye gains much from slow scrutiny of her episodic painterly skirmishes. 000 The viewer can easily follow the artist's journey, as these paintings are clearly built from separate painterly "events" spread out across the clean bright void. She subtly acknowledges-and sometimes even emphasizes-the boundaries of the rigid quadrilateral through frame-like, angular elements. But these are usually pushed to the side, offering a counterpoint to the graceful swooshes, ethereal spills, muscular swipes, and awkward smears that dominate and draw the viewer's eye around the work. By distributing these varied incidents around the snow-white surface, she creates a visual music that connects less with the symphonic harmonies of Kandinsky than with the eclecticism of contemporary sampling and musique concrète. The connection to Postmodern pastiche draws from the wide index of "styles" of paint application found within one work, from thinned washes that suggest watercolor and flat, thick, hard-edged stripes to upside-down drips and plenty of messy squishes of thick pigment. Fries's use of color is daring and inventive, swinging widely between "recognizable" standards such as baby boy blue and sun yellow and unexpected mixes of orange, white, and purple churned together then smeared into yellow wiped through with pale green. It is with panache and intelligent control that she juggles so much at once, pushing and pulling viewers between mark and void, light and heavy, fast and slow, horizontal and vertical, straight and curved. Pia Fries pulls it off. 000 Dana Friis-Hansen

Conceptual and aesthetic wrestling with Modernism - or expression of a  childlike inner life? No idea how they could be distinguished even if the artist told us what she was thinking.

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FEDERICO HERRERO

B. 1978

Paisaje, 2001, Oil on wall, 20 x 46 feet, 49th venice Biennial, Italy 

Wildly goofy and childish - the artist was 23 at the time, and the above won the Biennial’s top award.

Él, Ella y Mixeta, 2000, Oil, tempera, acrylic, enamel, and pilot on canvas, 63 x 59 inches, 

Dancers at a night club? It does feel figurative.

Grüen-ac, 2000, Oil, tempera, acrylic, and pilot on canvas, 59 x 59 inches

 

Above:Cara, 2002, Oil and marker on wall, Exhibition "Urgent Painting", Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 

 Below: Carefully repainted yellow areas, 2001, Traffic yellow paint on concrete, San José, Costa Rica 

               

 FEDERICO HERRERO  (b. 1978) made a name for himself at the 2001 Venice Biennial of Contemporary Art with a wall painting made in the Arsenale; it was difficult to tell whether the work had been meticulously constructed or totally improvised. Born in Costa Rica in 1978, and self-taught, Herrero has acknowledged the influence of the works of the Chilean draughtsman and painter Roberto Matta on his painting. Matta once described his process as somewhere between intuition and improvisation: "I would compare myself to a hydraulic tube through which a current is passing. I don't have the sense that it belongs to me, or even that I'm the one making a painting. It is this idea that gives me a certain freedom. If I started attributing the ownership and originality of it to myself, I would fall into a sort of delirious madness and think of myself as a genius, or a poet, or something of that sort. " The work of Federico Herrero is marked by a similar modesty, and so it is not surprising that, on the subject of artists who have most influenced him, immediately after Matta, he cites Gabriel Orozco. "From Gabriel Orozco I got this form of hypersensitivity to things that make up our everyday surroundings and the idea that sometimes it's more suitable to take rather than to create, to designate a sculpture rather than to conceive it. " 000 Herrero's artistic activity is in fact divided between works made in the studio and those made in outdoor situations that he creates as urban interventions. "I remain convinced of the importance of work in the studio, " he explains, "and the exercise that involves making a canvas, which is to say, working within a given, narrow, and limiting frame-work. All the same, the poststudio situation is also fundamental: to paint today, it is necessary to go outside the studio and the canvas and to work in the street in order to surmount and, specifically, displace these limits. " 000 Aside from canvases, then, Herrero has produced a set of ephemeral works-discreet interventions in _ the urban landscape-as in Tokyo, where he completely repainted two public buses (envisioned as paintings in motion), or in San José, where he regularly leaves his imprint on the street signs of the city, sometimes repairing damaged signs, diverting others from their original function. In the future, Federico Herrero hopes to transform this delicate interventionism into a permanent attitude and would particularly like to work with young children, less to teach them art than to explain to them how it is possible to blur the boundaries, to use Allan Kaprow's expression, between art and life. 000 Hans-Ulrich Obrist

I want art commentary to be personal to the writer.  But absent that, this kind of biographical writing is most useful.

Trusted Tropicos, 2013, 106 x 114”

Reminds me of our local Chicago master of the tropical, Candida Alvarez.

But Candida does feel more like an adult,

possibly because she's 20 years older.

Tempo Aberto, Installation mural, 2019, Brazil

His more recent work is still playful, but a bit more mellow.

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GEORGE SHAW

B. 1966

Scenes from the Passion: The Path to Pepys Corner, 2001, Humbrol enamel on board, 17 × 21 inches

Scenes from the Passion: Hometime, 1999, Humbrol enamel on board, 29 x 39

Scenes from the Passion: Christmas Eve, 1998, Humbrol enamel on board, 17 × 21 inches, 

Scenes from the Passion: The Evening, 2001, Humbrol enamel on board, 17 × 21 inches, 

Scenes from the Passion: The Fall, 1999, Humbrol enamel on board, 29 

Completely unlike anything else in Vitamin P  - combining a moody, Romantic  feeling with the graphic intensity of early Modernism.  I’m not sure I can share all that melancholy and exaltation simultaneously - but I  sure enjoy trying.

The brick wall that so many of us hit eventually in life.

 

GEORGE SHAW This is not conceptual painting. This is not the kind of art you learn at art school and build theories around. When George Shaw finished art school in 1989 he felt so artistically out of touch that he abandoned art altogether, working as a special-needs teacher before returning to art seven years later. "An unhealthy cocktail of embarrassment or indecision," says Shaw, meant that "for a long time I could never make the work I really wanted to make." Returning to art and enrolling at London's Royal College of Art in 1996, Shaw came to create a series of extremely personal works: small landscape paintings of his postwar-constructed hometown of Tile Hill, Coventry. Painted on small boards in an easel-type size that can be worked on comfortably at the kitchen or bedroom table, maybe in front of the TV, they are painted in Humbrol enamel paint, the hobby paints favored by teens. Out of step with the predominant 1990s moods of Brit Pop hysteria or postconceptual theory, these are quiet, evocative paintings that create a subtle autobiography. 000 In 1999 Shaw was among the prizewinners for the prestigious John Moores painting award with the beautiful Hometime, part of a series of paintings collectively titled "The Passion. " Reworked from photographs, these are pictures of unforgettable forgettable places, where the newly built housing estate of his youth merges unsteadily with the surrounding woods. Parking lots, vandalized garages, a concrete underpass, muddy shortcuts, semirural lots behind shops or next to the pub are emptied of people, cars, satellite dishes, and street signs-everything that might detract from the idealization of this disappointing landscape. The paintings are potently atmospheric; the overcast sky, the damp smell of the leaves, and the echo of an unseen foghorn all invisibly contribute as much to the work as the layers of resins that recall the Pre-Raphaelites and make the surface so rich and mesmerizing. These are the pictures of every hometown as we remember them from early youth, when we began to wander out of doors by ourselves, becoming aware of the surroundings we'd taken for granted until then. They are the memory of gaining our first sense of where we were from and beginning to judge it, deciding whether our surrounds were admirable, adequate, or despicable-an aware- ness that most likely emerged at the very moment we realized we were soon going to leave this place, probably forever. 000 Shaw's works are simple yet contradictory, both idealizing and criticizing the places depicted. They are a mix of "the workmanlike and the visionary, " as Pre-Raphaelite painting was once described, just as Shaw himself is part pub dweller and part poet, like so many figures in British art and literature, from wilde to Joyce to D.H. Lawrence. The painting technique itself conjures up its own contradictions. The model paint is excellent for rendering white window trims and thin branches of winter trees, but the piles of fallen leaves have the improbable, overdetailed look of an earnest entry to a local art competition. 000 Shaw captures the moment after the rain has stopped, when all the children have gone home. It's getting dark, and we're mistakenly alone. A routine place becomes unexpectedly meaningful, and still. "I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe, " notes Shaw. "For the one single moment I can recall, I feel a dull sadness for the thousands I have forgotten. " 000 Gilda Williams

Sadness of the Middle Age Life  Model, 2015, 24 x 18

Like Cezanne, Shaw’s mastery of landscape does not extend to the human figure.

But having seen hundreds of middle age art models over the years,  I love the humor here.

The Unlucky Bag, 2026, one color aquatint, 4 x 6”

Quite a powerful miniature.

In our age, he's an anomaly.

But back in the 19th Century, he would have been one of many great landscapists.