Viewing single post of blog Painting and theory

Painting in the expanded field and its notions caught my silent interest  a while ago, but I never really found a way to include it in my practice until now. My latest project introduced me to working with technicians and helped me to overcome the fear of working with someone else than myself. As known from my blog, working with myself was always my comfort zone and the best way of working.

Pushing painting out of its wall/flat space is something that I wish to continue working on. In my opinion, painting is thanks to that pushed into the contemporary and modern world, where paintings tend to be put aside.

I came across this text by Joanne Crawford , with which I strongly agree.

Crawford here notes that sculpture has been ‘allowed’ to become and important player within the ‘expanded field’ which is the opposite to the ‘fixed’ painting. Painting here is fixed within its own physical and material limitations. Painting is known to be unable to move away from the application of paint onto a flat surface and finds itself in an alliance with film, installation and performance ,,to the point of being absorbed by the ‘other’ and obliterated as painting.”

I believe that it then results in painting in the expanded field being taken as not painting. It falls into the category of ‘not-painting’ channelling its own version of ‘but this is not art!”.

Although It took me some time to find some artists that are working with the expanded field with the use of painting as a medium, I came across Katharina Grosse and her work Is it You?

Her work was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art and consisted of seven paintings made in the years between 2009-2017 and site relational work in the central gallery of the museum’s contemporary wing. Both then represent two halves of Grosse’s work.

Katharina Grosse is an artist known for her in situ paintings, where paint and more specifically spray paint is spread across architecture, interiors and landscapes. I strongly connect to one of her quotes: ,, A painting is simply a screen between the producer and the spectator where both can look at the thought processes residing on the screen from different angles and points in time. It enables me to look at the residue of my thinking”. The connection here is as guessed to the mention of the screen. Here, Grosse simply speaks about the gaze theory in one sense of way.

One of her mediums she uses is spray gun which is meant to distance the artist from the artistic act from the hand.


0 Comments