In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting? What can painting become in an observer’s encounter with it? This wide-ranging selection of texts emphasizes the coextensive work the viewer brings to painting alongside the artist—the construction of form and meaning.
Published by Sternberg Press, 2019
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The Observer Effect On Contemporary Painting
$30.00
By Barry Schwabsky
Edited with an introduction by Rob Colvin & Sherman Sam
In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting? What can painting become in an obse...