Some Excellent Contemporary Women Painters

These are some superlative painters, women who, unlike many of their male and female contemporaries, are not trying to rationalize their way out of what you might call visual responsibility, nor are they hobbled conceptually by their mastery of verisimilitude, nor are they trying to consciously crawl in and out of aesthetic ideology. They are highly active, intelligent painters. Art writers have found themselves scrambling around trying to classify them ideologically without much success, which for a painter, is an excellent sign.

They are also successful, through sheer hard work.

Mehretu -has some sources in digital and architectural drawing, but the paintings are huge and deep and beautiful. Each of these painters has a highly sophisticated understand of the transition between material and spatial illusion. Mehretu's piece at MOMA is not to be missed.

Cecily Brown is both sort of inspired by the Young British Artists, painters of the early nineties, like the scary and brilliant Jenny Saville, who makes Damien Hirst look like Jeff Koons (for the unfamiliar, this joke has been quality assured) and a harbinger of the rehabilitation of the use of the emotive, muscular gesture, spatially placed.

Margie is just hitting it fairly big- she's a complete painter (the one who passed on the phrase: being tired of "bleary, smeary, atmosphery.")

Ann Gale, a former professor of mine, has the most penetrating, remorseless green eyes I've ever seen. She once compared me physically to William Shatner, which, at the time, was a compliment. Her paintings take many months- the subjects look a little like they've been caught in an alien mind probe, so objective and unromanticized they make Lucien Freud look like Thomas Kincaid. (This joke has been quality assured). I am not stupid enough to argue with anyone who can see that well.

What they share is a a deep understanding of the way paint creates illusions, an architectural precision in their spaces, an almost Kiefer-like breadth of scale, and something of a brutal objectivity. (Did you miss the Anselm Kiefer show in S.F.? You get my pigeon-poo flavored buttermint of shame. That was the best art show I've seen in ten years. )

(Click on images for larger version).

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Julie Mehretu.











Cecily Brown.
















A Seattle painter and acquaintance, Margie Livingstone

Ann Gale
















Jenny Saville