XII Young Painter Prize Book

One of the minds behind the world-famous
Eames designs, Ray Eames, was
herself a classically trained painter. She
said that she never gave up painting, she
just changed her pallet. Painting is not a
strictly defined form; it can manifest itself
as an artistic vision or worldview. It
can be present in the way an artist uses
color, artistic gestures, space, and even
time. It can be a performative movement
that incorporates painterly qualities - the
aggressiveness or softness of the brush.
There are definitely dozens of artists who
work with sculpture, installations, performances,
photo and video art who from my
point of view are painters using different
kind of canvas.
Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein took one
of painting’s most important tools –the
brushstroke - and transformed it into a
mechanical, cold reproduction, or in other
words created a gravestone for it. Now,
apart from art that is strongly influenced
by the presence of the internet, there are
also certain forms that are reminiscent of
modernism. The brush stroke has suddenly
not just broken free from Lichtenstein’s flat
image in all its juicy textures and liquidity,
but it has also jumped out of the canvas
and become a sculptural entity itself.
The “fluidity” 2 we are experiencing now is
not just connected with the fluid borderlines
that exist between different art forms.
It’s time itself that has triggered a different
look at the world that hopefully won’t get
jammed by political “earthquakes” and
pandemics. Physical mobility and internet
connections have changed the way we
perceive our location, our connection with
it, and travel. It has been popular for some
time to revisit history, trying to decolonize
and expand it by filling it with stories of
different marginalized groups including
woman, queer communities and different
cultures and races. Archiving the ghosts
of the past has also become an important
part of the oeuvre of modern painters like
Luc Tuyman, Marlene Dumas and Neo
Rauch, all of whom blend their own personal
micro histories into their works.
A crucial source of liquidity is the influence
of the internet, the streams and surfing
opportunities it has provided, and the flows
of images and information we have experienced.
And then finally there is the post
human movement which forces us to shift
from our position of center and reconnect
with other living things and the world as
such. This idea about reconnecting and
fluidity is very much present in the poetic
texts of the essayist Astrida Neimanis,
which are dedicated to the topic of hydrofeminism
3 . Here she speaks of bodies being
water which, connected in an imaginably
tight yet fluid way, allow us to be
free of dogmas and flow where we need
to.
2 I borrowed the term from sociologist and philosopher
Zygmunt Bauman. He introduced late modernity as “liquid”
modernity which is marked by the global capitalist economies
and by the information revolution.
3 Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist
Phenomenology. - Lodon: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.