Tala Madani (American, b. Iran 1981), “Cave Interior #1,” 2019. Oil and mixed media on linen. 55 × 44 inches. The Mohn Family Trust/Photo by Flying Studio, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
“Look for light/shadow. Consider pictorial space.”
These directives, among others, are printed on stairs leading to an open-ended survey of paintings by artists at the peak of their practice at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
“50 Paintings,” co-curated by Margaret Andera, senior curator of contemporary art at MAM, and Michelle Grabner, artist, curator, and professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, leave the viewer with the responsibility to “formulate their own assessments of trends in contemporary painting.” As such, the show avoids further didactics, and simply begs us to look.
A humble twelve-inch landscape by Maureen Gallace hangs at one end of the exhibition. A cornflower blue shack in August light is surrounded by greenery. Buoyant shadows dance across the doorway. The painting is a poem of color and form. The shack seems to metaphorically house the multitudes of this exhibition.
Lisa Yuskavage offers an eroticized retelling of artistic fable. A nude pipe-smoking man kneels to paint directly on the body of his female muse, who stands before him, also unclothed. But we see that the woman also holds paint brushes in her hand, and another female figure is laid out as an odalisque in the background. Suffused in a gaudy, rouged light, the menage upends narratives of power and history. Nicole Eisenman similarly builds a meta narrative around creation in her work, “Keys, Phone, Wallet.” Here we see two figures drinking a bottle of wine. The left figure studiously leans in, carving a “stick and poke” tattoo with the painting’s title into the right figure’s arm. Eisenman uses a cartoonish figuration propelled by the legacy of Philip Guston in this intimate grouping. Bravura impasto effects in hair and skin, pouched and puncturing the surface of the tattoo, offer a lyrical experience. A lone flower stands against a broken moonlit night framing the intimacy of the scene, its subject matter both funny and grave. Amy Sherald’s woman king, Brad Kahlhamer’s large and layered self-portrait “11:59 to Mesa (SRP)” and Angela Dufresne’s avenging angel odalisque “Acid Queen” offer, with notable conviction, that figuration remains a capital concern for many painters.
Rao Fu (Chinese, b. 1978), “Inevitable III,” 2019. Oil on canvas. 36 × 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York/Image: Rao Fu and Fergus McCaffrey, New York
Andera and Grabner push more expansively in their curation as well. Rao Fu creates tension between abstraction and landscape in “Inevitable III.” What may be a mountain landscape expands into heightened, sun-flared neo-expressionist brushwork, creating slippage between thought and action. I returned to this painting again and again, bound in its mystery.
Another painting that rewards exploration is Torkwase Dyson’s “Memory (Liquid a Place).” Her working theory in creating “Black Compositional Thought,” which posits that throughways, water, architecture and geographies—are all composed and inhabited by Black bodies, presents itself as a layered, mixed black-and-blue sculptural arc. The composition is a minimalist gesture coated on the bottom with graphite, pulling the arc downward like a lead weight. Torkwase’s painting requires more opportunity for contemplation than is afforded here. The painting simply demands more space for itself to be fully realized.
Peter Barrickman (American, b. 1971), “Sleeping Dogs,” 2021. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 42 × 40 inches. Courtesy of The Green Gallery, Milwaukee/Image: The Green Gallery, Milwaukee
The exhibition is bookended with a pairing of two canvases echoing the powdery blues of Gallace’s shack. Amy Sillman and Peter Barrickman both move deftly between image and abstraction, pattern and purity. Barrickman is the only artist hailing from Wisconsin. An anonymous meeting of two figures, hooded and scarved against a wintry tree and sky, echoes the quiet isolation of the recent pandemic. Blue melds from scarf to pants, and from paint into metaphor. Sillman’s more dynamic composition again vacillates between abstraction and image. A wave of shape and form rises, cresting as it moves to the left, propped up quite literally by a silver fork. Both artists use humor and bravura technique to gain a mysterious gestalt of experience.
Though the curators have wisely left this remarkable grouping of paintings to speak on their own terms, comments were drawn from the artists. Together they become a meditation on painting and on the work of painting.
“What residue will remain with a viewer once they are no longer looking at the image?” “How do I approach color? With joy.”
These thoughts, and the artworks themselves, speak to the continued importance, and perhaps even primacy, of painting in the contemporary canon of art.
“50 Paintings” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on view through June 23, 2024.
