Dear Painter: Paint Me

$80.00 Member Price: $72.00

The exhibition "Dear Painter, Paint Me …" borrows its title from Martin Kippenberger’s polemic 1981 series for which the artist commissioned a professional poster painter for one year to translate photographs selected by him into large-format pictures. This subtle play with the role of the painter illustrates how ambiguous, deceptive, and pliable pictures have become in today’s mass media world. Kippenberger’s skeptical radical view of the concept of authenticity in realistic painting outlines an attitude which the artists of this exhibition share.

Highlighting 18 artistic positions from 1940 until today, "Dear Painter, Paint Me …" fathoms the role and range of figurative painting. The exhibition begins with the heydays of doubting realistic modes of representation, the early years of European fascism. Intense correspondences between the members of the Frankfurt School driven into exile in the mid-thirties initiated a debate which established an opposition between the possibilities of a critical realism and the project of modernity. It was in those days that Francis Picabia, undoubtedly a protagonist of the avant-garde, began to paint colorful realistic pictures with a kitschy tenor, using erotic magazines such as "Mon Paris" and "Paris Sex Appeal" as his source. Picabia’s bent for an apparently anti-modernist figurative art of portrayal in the academic style was considered an affront.

List of artists: Kai Althoff, Carole Benzaken, Glenn Brown, Bernhard Buffet, Brian Calvin, John Currin, Peter Doig, Sophie von Hellermann, Alex Katz, Kurt Kauper, Martin Kippenberger, Enoc Perez, Bruno Perrament, Elizabeth Peyton, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch, Luc Tuymans.