This online exhibition casts light on digital painting at a moment when the practice is gaining more widespread recognition. Unlike works by artists such as Albert Oehlen, who have translated digital gestures and imagery to a gallery context, the works featured in “Brushes”—by artists Laura Brothers, Jacob Ciocci, Petra Cortright, Joe Hamilton, Sara Ludy, Michael Manning, Giovanna Olmos, and Andrej Ujhazy—were created specifically for online circulation and display.
As art historian Alex Bacon writes in an essay for Rhizome, “In a sense, painting has always existed in relation to technology, when the term is understood in its broad definition as the practical application of specialized knowledge: the brush, the compass, the camera obscura, photography, or the inkjet printer.” However, if painting has long involved the application of tools and techniques, it has also served another function: it makes technological conditions available for visual contemplation in the gallery. (Think, for example, of Vera Molnár’s television paintings, which evoke the visual style of that technology.)
Today, many paintings that are displayed in the gallery are also contemplated online on platforms such as Instagram. This is a widely discussed phenomenon, but what is often overlooked in painting discourse is the role played by works created and experienced on the computer and the internet. This kind of digital painting has existed since the 1960s: for example, the category of “computer paintings” was included in Jasia Reichardt’s landmark 1968 art and technology exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. “Brushes” acknowledges this long history while focusing on practices that have emerged in recent years.
As the role of painting in the gallery continues to shift, “Brushes” aims to suggest that works produced on the computer and experienced via the browser and the mobile app have an equal place in the medium’s discourses, offering a space for contemplation of our technological society from within its complex apparatus.