New European Painting emerged in the 1980s and reached a critical point of major distinction and influence in the 1990s with painters like
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary Germa ...
,
Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.
Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s ...
,
Georg Baselitz,
Anselm Kiefer and
Bracha Ettinger whose paintings have established and continue to create a new dialogue between the historical archive, American Abstraction and figuration. The major new European painters of this era show strong engagements with painful personal and general history, as well as shared history; its memory and its oblivion; and with life under the shadow of World War II, utilizing research in new and old materials, photography and oil painting.
Development
These were followed by painters like
Luc Tuymans,
Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas (born 3 August 1953) is a South African artist and painter currently based in the Netherlands.
Life and work
Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had ...
and others,. A third wave came with artists like
Neo Rauch,
Michaël Borremans and
Chris Ofili
Christopher Ofili, (born 10 October 1968) is a British Turner Prize-winning painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in T ...
.
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called ''Transavantgarde'', '' Junge Wilde'' or ''Neue Wilden'' ('The new wild ones'; 'Ne ...
and other related movements in painting have emerged in the final two decades of the 20th century in Europe and in the United States, but this New Painting is not
expressionist
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
. Rather it is a renovative kind of abstraction and figuration that relates to the parallel practice of a turning into art of personal and historical photographic archives.
Concerns
New European Painting relates to the post-traumatic traces of war and it involves working oil painting and drawings with new media like photography, xerox and digital media to create and develop a postmodern archive "fever". This painting relates through this aspect to the post-World War II "archive" art with artists like
Christian Boltanski
Christian Liberté Boltanski (6 September 1944 – 14 July 2021) was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French Conceptual art, conceptual style.
Early li ...
and
Jochen Gerz
Jochen Gerz (born 4 April 1940) is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, parti ...
, and it is often a part of this tendency. Yet, though this painting has a clear figurative stroke it is strongly connected to
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
''European Abstraction Lyrique'' born in Paris, the French art critic Jean José Marchand being credited with coining its name in 1947, considered ...
to contemporary reconsiderations of the
Sublime in art while creating a new inner space in painting and in the series of paintings.
[Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "Inner Space of Painting", in: Catherine de Zegher (ed.) ''Inside the Visible'', MIT Press, 1996]
Bibliography
* Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Laurence Bosse and Carolyne Christove-Bakargiev, ''La Ville, le Jardin, la Memoire / City, Garden, Memory''. Villa Medici, Rome, 1999.
* Michael Ann Holley and Keith Moxey, ''Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies''. Clarck Art Institute, Studley Press 2002.
* Chris Dercon, ''Face a l'Histoire / In Front of History''. Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1996.
*
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock''The International Who's Who of Women''; 3rd ed.; ed. Elizabeth Sleeman, Europa Publications, 2002, p. 453 (born 11 March 1949) is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist stud ...
, ''Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive''. Routledge, 2007.
* Patrick Le Nouene and Jochen Gerz, ''Gerz: L'oeuvres sur papier photographique 1983-86''. Musee des Beaux-Arts de Calais, 1986.
See also
*
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called ''Transavantgarde'', '' Junge Wilde'' or ''Neue Wilden'' ('The new wild ones'; 'Ne ...
*
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
''European Abstraction Lyrique'' born in Paris, the French art critic Jean José Marchand being credited with coining its name in 1947, considered ...
*
Postmodern art
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, ...
*
Late Modernism
In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and ...
*
Modernism
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
*
Digital painting
Digital painting is an established art medium that typically combines a computer, a graphics tablet, and software of choice. The artist uses painting and drawing with the stylus that comes with the graphics tablet to create 2D paintings within ...
*
Intermedia
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to work ...
References
External links
History of Painting
History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary ArtKandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Retrieved May 28, 2007
Concerning the relation of 20th-century painting to history
{{Westernart
Art movements in Europe
Contemporary art organizations