Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The earliest works in this exhibition were made in the aftermath of Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘Modernist Painting which was first published in 1960. Greenberg was later to express his regret about the effect and influence of his essay which fostered the view that the self-reflexive language of abstract painting could only lead to an exhaustion of its possibilities and the death of the medium. The Indiscipline of Painting asserts a different historical trajectory for abstract painting. It shows that the languages of abstraction have remained urgent relevant and critical revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last fifty years and that they continue to provoke contemporary practitioners into dialogue. Far from being solely formal preoccupations abstract paintings are connected to the world that they inhabit addressing architecture interrogating design and reviewing their own history. For both Tate St Ives and the University of Warwick this dialogue is of particular interest. For Tate St Ives it allows the institution to reframe readings of the abstract paintings that were made by a small international colony of artists in the middle years of the twentieth century. charting a parallel trajectory that sits alongside the legacies of British constructionist and abstract expressionist practices. For the University of Warwick it presents the opportunity to relate its collection of abstract paintings from both St Ives and from North America to a strand of art practice that resonates with the institution’s continued commissioning and purchase of abstract paintings for the built environment of the campus. (MP)