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Painting Today
Painting Today is a comprehensive overview of the last 30 years of painting, presenting work by celebrated figures like Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch alongside emerging artists like Jumaldi Alfi and Ingrid Calame. Photo-realism, landscape, still-life, portraiture, neo-expressionism, installation painting and the Leipzig school are just some of the areas of this thriving art medium explored by Tony Godfrey. Organized by themes, Painting Today showcases the broad range of styles, materials and methods that comprise contemporary painting. Insightful and accessible, Painting Today's approach will appeal to scholars and newcomers to the subject alike.
- GenresArtArt History
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 1, 2009
And now for something a little more highbrow... Painting Today is a big fat heavy stroll through, um, painting today. Ever since divorcing my first husband, an artist who dragged me to Chelsea every weekend (and NOT to shop) and forced me to contemplate Tony Oursler and Rachel Whiteread for rather longer than I might under normal circumstances, I confess that I have been not much attuned to contemporary art.
My loss. Painting is doing really well, if the works on these pages are any indication. Over two hundred artists are represented, which gives the book a nice wide spectrum, just about any way you slice it: abstract to representational, formalist to content-driven, academic to self-taught (Henry Darger! Holla!), well-known to (er) less-well-known. ALMOST any way you slice it. There are not as many Asian, African, or Arab artists and one might expect.
We see old friends like Salle and Brice Marden, Thomas Struth, Schnabel, Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer - with names like that, what were they going to be, ballplayers? Phillip Taaffe is still making hypnotic patterns, Currin still looks like a pervert, and I will NEVER like Lucian Freud.
But there's stuff in here I've never seen before, stuff that takes my breath away and makes me stop. Vija Celmins does emptiness that is full of emotion. Richard Prince uses gorgeous color and big painterly brushstrokes to show us what we missed in pulp fiction book covers. Bernard Frize is my new Whitney-style formalist crush. Matthew Ritchie's 3-D painting puts my mind at full boggle. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is someone I must remember.
I'm just so glad to know that art schools still turn out painters, and that not all painters are Takashi Murakami.
My loss. Painting is doing really well, if the works on these pages are any indication. Over two hundred artists are represented, which gives the book a nice wide spectrum, just about any way you slice it: abstract to representational, formalist to content-driven, academic to self-taught (Henry Darger! Holla!), well-known to (er) less-well-known. ALMOST any way you slice it. There are not as many Asian, African, or Arab artists and one might expect.
We see old friends like Salle and Brice Marden, Thomas Struth, Schnabel, Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer - with names like that, what were they going to be, ballplayers? Phillip Taaffe is still making hypnotic patterns, Currin still looks like a pervert, and I will NEVER like Lucian Freud.
But there's stuff in here I've never seen before, stuff that takes my breath away and makes me stop. Vija Celmins does emptiness that is full of emotion. Richard Prince uses gorgeous color and big painterly brushstrokes to show us what we missed in pulp fiction book covers. Bernard Frize is my new Whitney-style formalist crush. Matthew Ritchie's 3-D painting puts my mind at full boggle. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is someone I must remember.
I'm just so glad to know that art schools still turn out painters, and that not all painters are Takashi Murakami.
November 5, 2012
Seriously this is yet another waste of space about painting. Just a rolodex of artists, no core, no objective. Its fine as far as a temperature but that is what makes it so underwhelming. Many of these artists appear in like 5 other books on Painting today. I just don't get these yearbooks. I'd rather there be some sort of argument or attempt at trying to synthesize what is going on.
November 5, 2011
A very interesting and enlightening survey of contemporary painting from the 70's to today. Well worth reading if you are interested in the subject.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews