Brushstrokes, glitches, and chromatic webs circulate throughout this gallery, offering a look at how artists across generations have explored and reconsidered the legacies of gestural abstraction, a painterly process that came to prominence in the 1940s. Artists like Ken Okiishi and Naotaka Hiro create works that connect the intensity of feeling suggested in the paintings of art-historical predecessors—such as Joan Mitchell—with the way that images, ideas, and physical traces are shared in the present, often mediated through technology.
In his 2015 essay “Painting Paintings,” Okiishi describes his experience of spending time with Mitchell’s work as evoking a feedback loop between the mind and the body. He writes of “being with the painting as a disappearing of the body,” pointing to the ways that a viewer’s shifting physical experience of a painting might ignite their imagination. Spanning decades, and using materials that range from the canvas to the flat screen, artists continue to turn to painting as a portal to expanded ways of thinking, feeling, and being.
Organized by Lanka Tattersall, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
