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This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
Back in 1838, Louis Daguerre captured the first photo of a human being with revolutionary technology. Not long after, the French painter Paul Delaroche purportedly made a startling, widely quoted declaration: “From today, painting is dead.”
Well, not so fast. The complex photo technology used then is no longer widely used. And almost two centuries later, painting is far from dead — even if it has evolved.
This fall, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is mounting a spirited defense of the medium, with an exhibiton that looks at the ways that painting has evolved (and thrived) over roughly the last 50 years.
“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” curated by Jamillah James and Jack Schneider, an assistant curator at the museum, and featuring both paintings made the traditional way and works made using media and other technology, will be on display from Nov. 9 through March 23.
James, who is also the museum’s senior curator, explained in an email interview: “The show looks at how computers, the internet, cameras (including video and photography) and automation have influenced the production and reception of painting.”
She noted that, besides making traditional paintings, the artists in the show also use photography, sculpture, printmaking and digital tools; the media and approach vary from artist to artist. Some works adopt techniques borrowed from other disciplines; some blend art history, internet culture and other references; and some use humor or satire. Several pieces also critique exclusionary practices in the art world, such as Shigeko Kubota’s “Vagina Painting” (1965), which James said addresses “the predominant visibility of male painters.”
Among the artists featured in the exhibition are Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Thomas Bayrle, Gina Beavers, Judy Chicago, Chuck Close, Petra Cortright, Cynthia Daignault, Charles Gaines, Frederick Hammersley, Paul McCarthy, Howardena Pindell, Carolee Schneemann and Andy Warhol.
The show does include some works created before 1970, in order to provide context for the works that follow. Some of these early works include Warhol’s 1964 ‘Jackie Frieze,’ — a silk screen on linen that reproduces TV portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy before, during and after her husband’s assassination and funeral — and Chicago’s ‘Desert Atmosphere, 1969, Palm Desert, CA,’ a photograph illustrating one of a series of performances, in which Chicago and several unidentified others set off fireworks in the desert of the American West.
Among the most recent works in the show is ‘Watching 5" (2024), in which Tishan Hsu embeds silicone casts of 3D-printed body parts into digitally manipulated fields of images and rippled moire patterns.
Another recent piece is Petra Cortright’s 2016 digital painting on anodized aluminum, ‘fox 999 arizona@morning-pro (version final Hirva). execute,’ which the exhibition catalog says “approximates landscape,” with shattered forms that float “above clusters of white and yellow that resemble flowers or scattered seeds.”
Cortright, whose work was featured in a previous group show at the museum, called “I Was Raised on the Internet,” created the work using Photoshop; the image was then printed on aluminum with UV-cured aqua-solvent inks.
Cortright — who grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is based in Pasadena, Calif. — said in a phone interview that she creates her artwork with Photoshop to build layers, with every brushstroke in the work a separate layer.
She said that in her paintings on aluminum, she experiments with “a 3D effect on a 2D surface.” She also said her work is influenced by the colors of California — especially its oranges and pinks — and by the state’s quality of light.
Noting that people “struggle to accept digital art as a legitimate art form,” she said she hoped “people will engage with it. I am proud to work digitally and hope people enjoy my work.”
Cynthia Daignault, on the other hand, works in a more traditional medium (oil on canvas), but plays with the possibilities of painting, as in the 24-part work “At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky)” (2017). That piece, she explained, presents a series of paintings as camera snapshots of an idyllic forest landscape. The work represents Picture Lake, in Washington state, with Mount Shuksan in the background.
In a phone interview, Daignault said “visitors there can capture the perfect photo of a single mountain behind an alpine lake.”
This scene, she explained, “is a perfect metaphor” for the real world’s relationship to the mediated world.
“I was really focusing on how we interact with the landscape, the contemporary experience of the landscape that stitches together our experience with our understanding of a mountain as a place,” she said.
The work, she added, “combines a visual reflection with virtual reality,” depicting “how we live half in the real world and half in the digital world.”
“For me," she continued, “that piece is my attempt to portray the contemporary consciousness, what the contemporary landscape is.”
In thinking about her practice, Daignault said that “at its core level,” painting is a “sacred practice that stretches back to the beginning of human history. I find that very moving, to be on a continuum that stretches back to cave walls. What keeps me going every day is that I do the same thing as Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Neanderthals.”
James, the curator, said that in the past, “there have been some concerns that photography would be the undoing of painting, but painting has returned in different forms.” She noted that the medium is “more multidisciplinary,” citing pieces like Daignault’s lake work and other pieces in the show, such as Charles Gaines’s “Numbers and Trees #6” (1989), which combines painting and sculpture.
She concluded, “Painting will always be a part of the visual world, regardless of new technical or artistic developments, or cycles of criticism saying otherwise.”
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