As Painting: Division and Displacement

As Painting, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Wexner Center for the Arts, offers thought-provoking new perspectives on the evolution of painting in the United States and Europe since the mid-1960s. It illuminates the flexible boundaries of what can be seen or interpreted "as painting" and that medium's interrelationships with sculpture, photography, and installation, highlighting points of convergence and divergence.

The featured artists include such major figures as Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sherrie Levine, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Robert Smithson, as well as artists who are much less known, at least in the United States. Pivotal to the discussion is the work of a number of significant but relatively unfamiliar French painters, including Martin Barre, Christian Bonnefoi, Simon Hantai, Michel Parmentier, and Francois Rouan. The book serves as an introduction to their work while providing fresh interpretations of the more familiar artists. Also highlighted are several artists not usually thought of as "painters," among them Polly Apfelbaum, Mel Bochner, Judd, Smithson, Anne Truitt, and James Welling.

The book features two extended essays, detailed commentaries on each of the twenty-six artists in the exhibition, and fourteen additional essays by artists and commentators noted for their engagement with the issues raised here. These include a commentary on Simon Hantai by Alfred Pacquement, Director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; original essays by French critics Catherine Millet and Christian Prigent; interviews with artists Martin Barre and Mel Bochner; and a little-known set of notes by Jacques Lacan on the painting of Francois Rouan.

Exhibition Information:
Wexner Center for the Arts
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
May 11-August 12, 2001

Philip Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Studies in the Humanities, Laura Lisbon is a painter and Associate Professor of Art, and Stephen Melville is Professor of the History of Art, all at Ohio State University.