Exhibition, 2 Jun 2016 - 6 Nov 2016

Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age

MUMOK - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria

The exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age places our sustained interest in contemporary painting and the continuous expansion of digital technologies within a surprising historical context. This exhibition goes back to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s and shows how painting already then developed in productive friction with mass culture and its media. From the arrival of television to the so-called internet revolution, painting has consistently succeeded in integrating the mechanisms that seemed to herald its own death.

With more than two hundred artworks by more than one hundred artists, Painting 2.0 tells the multifaceted story of painting from the 1960s to the present. Painting is seen as a form of practice that—contrary to canonical accounts—in no way shies away from increasing media realities, but rather faces the challenges head on. One driving force in this development is the collision of visual codes of the spectacle with the traces of painterly expressivity. Painting 2.0 shows that the expressive gesture was again and again connected with the desire to reintegrate the virtual world of the information age into the material realm of the human body. In painting over the last fifty years, the contrary domains of the human and the technological, and the analog and the digital have proven to be intrinsically intertwined.

Curator: Manuela Ammer