Jaqueline Humphries, UNTITLED, 2005, black lightbox, acrylic on fabric, 52×60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nyehaus, New York. (From BOMB 107, Spring 2009).
In an email to me recently, Cheryl Donegan called abstract painting “the new black.” It’s everywhere in New York this fall, in several manifestations. The Kitchen’s clunkily-titled show Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture is a somewhat punk iteration of abstraction, thanks to the inclusion of artists like Jacqueline Humphries, Cheryl Donegan, Nate Lowman, Alex Hubbard, and Wade Guyton. In the basement of the Cheslea 511 West 25th Street space is Bob Nickas’s aptly-titled Cave Paintings, a tighter and more colorful (figuratively, literally) selection that coincides with Nickas’s magisterial new book Painting Abstraction published by Phaidon. BOMB hasn’t ignored the trend: we recently began publishing a roundtable of abstract painters moderated by the artist Jackie Saccoccio, in addition to our many interviews that tackle the eternally thorny topic: Walead Beshty and Eileen Quinlan, Steve DiBenedetto, Jörg Immendorff, Joan Mitchell, Ross Bleckner, Brice Marden, Polly Apfelbaum, Carroll Dunham, Terry Winters, Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilmann, Thomas Nozkowski, Pat Steir, Robert Mangold, Michael Goldberg, Julie Mehretu, and many more.
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