Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today August 14, 2012

Drawn primarily from the MCA Collection but augmented with works from the Chicago community, the exhibition explores the decades-old skepticism about how painterly gestures are made. Rauschenberg and Warhol, pioneers who have become so central to the discussion, were early adopters of the silk-screen process in the 1960s. Across the Atlantic, artists such as Sigmar Polke, who likewise combined the hand-painted and the printed, further complicated these provocations by using patterned fabrics instead of pristine canvas. Recently, a new generation of artists has built on these breakthroughs--critically engaging the romance of the artist's hand. By using printing techniques, staining, spraying, and other methods, artists as diverse as Wade Guyton, Rebecca Morris, Sergej Jensen, Kerstin Bratsch, and Sterling Ruby, to name just a few, extend these ideas into the present, connecting them with new concerns and conditions. As in the medical sense of the term, a phantom limb may no longer be in evidence, but its owner still feels its presence, is haunted by it, and struggles with instinctive urges to use it. In much the same way, painters today, perhaps perversely, find ways to maintain a critical distance to the hand, even though its presence is hard to deny.