The Painting Factory

Los Angeles

The exhibition The painting factory explores the recent transformation of abstract painting into one of the most dynamic platforms in contemporary art. The exhibition addresses a painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive but has now become expansive, merging popular culture and current technology into its vocabulary, including works by Tauba Auerbach, Mark Bradford, DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder), Urs Fischer, Wade Guyton, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Seth Price, Sterling Ruby, Josh Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Kelley Walker, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.

Ironically, one of the places where this fresh approach to abstraction was germinating was the studio that might seem the farthest from the practice of the abstract tradition, Andy Warhol’s Factory. The Factory was a heaven for all sorts of brilliant artistic misfits, but was also a laboratory where the historical and contemporary innovations in art and culture could be remixed and reconstituted. Especially after Warhol refocused on painting in the late 1970s and 1980s with series like ‚Shadows‘, ‚Oxidations‘, and ‚Rorschachs‘, he transformed pure abstraction into an impure product that opened up new directions. He thrived on the increasing confusion between high art and progressive popular culture and the challenge to conventional methods of painting by the techniques of mechanical reproduction. These confrontations simultaneously undermined and expanded the accepted approaches to painting.

MOCA Grand Avenue

April 29th – August 20th, 2012
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
USA

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