Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas

Painting appears to have dispelled its own once uncontested material basis. No longer synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, painting in its current incarnations tends instead to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation. Thinking through Painting, from the Institut F r Kunstkritik series, investigates painting s traits and reception through contri butions by Peter Geimer and Isabelle Graw. With a focus on Luc Tuymans, Geimer questions the claims commonly made for contemporary painting s superior reflexivity based on its distance from everyday experiences of immersion. Graw situates painting s residual specificity in the semiotic activity of mark making rather than materiality, demonstrating that painting s perseverance is grounded in the suggestion that it can attain agency as a quasi person.