“Painting Forever” is a special edition of KALEIDOSCOPE entirely dedicated to the past, present and future of the medium. The most persistent of art forms — one that was once given up for dead, then revived and is now more alive than ever — painting has been at the core of an intense research process that we undertook in collaboration with writers, curators and artists of different origins, beliefs and generations, all of whom share a desire to examine its history and envision its forthcoming possibilities. The questions we asked, and asked ourselves, were: Which artists are practicing painting in a relevant way today? Which conceptual and formal strategies, which modes of presentation and diffusion, do they deploy? And, ultimately, why? What are contemporary painters’ motives, references and perspectives? This issue is the tentative answer, and one which will hopefully foster further debate.

HIGHLIGHTS
In the opening section we introduce you to the work of five emerging artists: Oscar Murillo, Ryan Sullivan, Allison Katz, Jonathan Binet and Tala Madani. All born in the 1980s in different parts of the world, they’ve chosen to explore, revisit, celebrate and challenge the idea and practice of painting, with a common spirit of engagement and varying degrees of irony and irreverence.

MAIN THEME
This section, on the other hand, consists of extensive conversations with four artists born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s — Heimo Zoberning, John Currin, Amy Sillman and Michael Krebber — who represent divergent yet equally prominent and visionary approaches to the medium. Their common ground most revealingly lies in the influence they exert on a younger generation of artists. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that three of them hold teaching positions at eminent art schools, including the Academy of Fine Arts in Wien, Columbia University in New York and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

MONO
This issue is likewise devoted to a painter, Los Angeles-based artist Dianna Molzan, whose practice occupies the liminal space between two-and three-dimensionality, between “pictures” and “objects,” and whose works convey a sophisticated research on abstraction encompassing elements drawn from the history of painting, as well as from design, fashion and visual culture at large.

REGULARS
This section features the work of NY–based artist Nikolas Gambaroff and of Italian conceptualist Giorgio Griffa, alongside discussions with the director of a prestigious foundation dedicated to the legacy of Pablo Picasso and the curators of an ambitious group exhibition, “Painter Painter,” soon to open at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

INSERTS
Finally, this issue is enriched with commissioned inserts by three exciting young artists — Marieta Chirulescu, Fredrik Værslev and Keegan McHargue — that have each contributed a unique and affecting visual take on the making and experiencing of painting today.

Painting — The Implicit Horizon documents a symposium which took place at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The book presents essays and transcripts of discussions between European and American artists, art historians, and critics who have looked at some of the ways painting has been conceived of in the eras after Conceptual Art. Addressing ideas of production and consumption, critiques of the end of art, issues of age, accomplishment, and the myth of the painter, the book posits that painting, as a working practice as well as a historical referent, serves as an implicit horizon or limit condition for other media.

“Jimson lives in a ramshackle houseboat on the Thames river, where he reminisces about the days when the state collected his paintings, hides from the police (who pursue him for his minor infractions and debts) and schemes about how to extract money from various wealthy patrons. That is, his struggles are conceptual, material and financial and always involve a race against time and an acknowledgement of his own limitations even in light of his successes. After a series of roguish scrapes, he finally receives a retrospective at Tate Britain: a triumph that does little to alleviate his destitution. But the film’s dénouement comes when Jimson paints a “monument to England”: a giant mural representing “The last Judgment” on the side of a bombed-out church aided by a cadre of voluntary art student assistants who he keeps remunerated in cups of coffee. The film ends when Jimson — threatened by council developers looking to capitalize on the land — voluntarily bulldozes his mural in advance of the city bureaucrats and sails off down the Thames in search of a new horizon: perhaps another, larger wall (or a further expansion of painting as such).”

CONTRIBUTORS
Carol Armstrong, Warren Carter, Helmut Draxler, Kerstin Stakemeier, Elisabeth Lebovici, Esther Leslie, Avigail Moss, Ulrike Müller, Dierk Schmidt, and Amy Sillman.