When Image Processing Became Painting

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Friday, February 2, of When Image Processing Became Painting, an exhibition featuring paintings and drawings by a group of 13 artists, along with a video work fragment by Jean-Luc Godard. The show will be held at our 88 Eldridge Street space.

At what precise moment in the last hundred years did artists become actively aware that images preceded their efforts to produce new ones? It remains a question for debate, but what is less uncertain is that the ubiquitous and incessant circulation of pictures now constitutes a kind of second nature, a psychological condition shared by all, and by painters in particular.

The exhibition is anchored in the work of Andy Warhol, who pioneered the passive reception, slight displacement and enhancement of mass communication imagery as the essential subject matter of painting. As acts of celebration of highly recognizable photographic sources, his paintings consisted primarily in selecting, cropping, silkscreening and coloring pictures that the public already knew all too well. On the other side of the spectrum, Gerhard Richter’s ‘personal photography’, and its crucial role in forming the foundation of his vast painting production, serves as another distinct source of inspiration for the project.