Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings

About the Exhibition

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Examining Pictures, a provocative analysis of international contemporary painting through September 19, 1999. Examining Pictures presents the work of 56 artists - including Laura Owens, Gary Hume, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, and Udomsak Krisanamis - within an historical context, establishing links with works by artists of earlier generations, such as Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Francis Bacon, and Ilya Kabakov. Each artist is represented by one work in the exhibition.

Establishing points of convergence and disruption between works separated by time, Examining Pictures presents the viewer with a maze of memories, concepts, stories, and flashbacks on the subject of painting. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the exhibition was curated by the MCA’s Manilow Senior Curator Francesco Bonami and the Whitechapel’s Head of Programming Judith Nesbitt.

"Examining Pictures looks at painting as the ultimate virtual space that in the last four decades has been challenged, attacked, dismissed and subverted, but never abandoned or forgotten," said Bonami. "At the heart of this exhibition is the conviction that painting has a particular importance, not just to artists, but within Western culture as an encounter with reality; a way of establishing a relationship between ourselves and the world around us."

The first work viewers will encounter in the exhibition is John Baldessari's text painting Examining Pictures (1967) from which the exhibition borrows its title. Its text asks: "What do pictures consist of?" and "What are they all about?" While basic, these questions are the starting point for an exhibition that analyzes the subject of painting and its evolution over the last four decades.

Bringing together a range of work from the 1960s to the present, Examining Pictures allows the viewer to see a butterfly painting by Damien Hirst presented alongside Electric Chair by Andy Warhol. Both Hirst and Warhol’s paintings re-work the traditional still life, freezing the moment of death in the form of a painting.

The exhibition also brings together the work of the young Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis and the Japanese painter On Kawara. Krisanamis' paintings are slow accretions of black ink over news print in which everything is shrouded except the "O's." Kawara's canvas simply states the date it was painted: "29 Feb 1989." Both artists use the medium of painting to reflect on time and duration.

Examining Pictures is presented in the North Exhibition Gallery on the second floor of the Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by an 80-page full-color illustrated catalogue with essays by Bonami and Nesbitt. The catalogue is available now at culturecounter, the MCA’s store and bookstore.