Mystery of Painting, The: Goetz Collection

by Chris Ofili, Francesco Bonami

At various points in this past century, painting has been pronounced dead, painters have been plagued by self-doubt, the act of painting has been equated with the flogging of a dead horse, and the art of painting has been reduced to the separate ingredients of color, ground, and brushstroke. Yet each of the painters included in "The Mystery of Painting" treats their art form as an emancipated, proud medium that neither calls for a conceptual apology nor for external justification. Linked not by a uniform style but by a common attitude, their pictures are not images of the world but about the world. From Matthew Ritchie's scientific mythologies to Karen Kilimnik's piercingly pretty portraits, from Chris Ofili's cross-cultural collages to Laura Owens's expansive doodles of flora and fauna, "The Mystery of Painting" may not be such a mystery after all.
Edited by Ingvild Goetz & Rainald Schumacher. Essays by Kirsty Bell, Francesco Bonami, Beth Coleman, Adrian Dannatt, Isabelle Graw, Hans Rudolf Reust, Birgit Sonna, Wolf Gunter Thiel and Benjamin Weissman. Interview by Jessica Morgan. Artists Ellen Gallagher, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Udomsak Krisanamis, Sarah Morris, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Lari Pittman, Matthew Ritchie. 7 x 9.75 in.
90 color illustrations
English/German

194 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2002