Countering the recycled chorus that “painting is dead,” the Museum of Up to date Artwork Chicago’s just lately opened exhibition, The Residing Finish: Portray and Different Applied sciences, 1970–2020, means that portray stays in a relentless state of renewal and rebirth.
The Residing Finish assembles a physique of labor that cuts throughout geographies, histories, and contexts, reflecting portray’s development alongside rising applied sciences and altering cultures. By way of works by a various group of 60 artists, the exhibition surveys the final 50 years of portray, specializing in landmark technological and conceptual shifts. This contains the generative relationships between nonetheless pictures and portray, and video and efficiency artwork, in addition to computer systems’ position in artmaking, from experiments with computer-assisted graphics within the mid-Sixties to the mining of digital and social media tradition at the moment.
Jaqueline Humphries, “MN+//ssss” (element) (2023), oil on linen; 114 × 127 inches (Assortment Museum of Up to date Artwork Chicago, Present of the American Artwork Basis by trade and the Pritzker Traubert Visionary Artwork Acquisition Fund, 2024.5. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Picture: Ron Amstutz)
“The way that the show is organized is this mirror image that looks at how artists used early computers and early media production tools like the Xerox machine, and then how artists are now beginning to outsource the production of their work to computers, printers, other people, so on and so forth. And these two mirror images are situated at different points in history. The show is looking at a trajectory and a forward progression of these ideas from the 1960s and even before that to the present.” – Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator and organizer of the exhibition
Cheryl Donegan, “Whoa Whoa Studio (for Courbet)” (2000), video with colour and sound ; 3 minutes, 21 seconds (picture courtesy Digital Arts Intermix, New York)
Comprising work, performances, movies, and set up works, The Residing Finish examines how artists have challenged elementary assumptions about portray, finally altering our understanding of what constitutes a portray, how they are often produced, and who could be thought of a painter.
The Residing Finish is curated by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator, with Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator. It’s on view at MCA Chicago via April 13, 2025.
To study extra, go to mcachicago.org/thelivingend.
