A wide-ranging collection of texts on contemporary
painting,
by one of its most finest observer today.
In
The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting,
poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that
painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the
twentieth-century belief that
abstraction
and
figuration in
painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of
asking or answering the questions: What is painting? What can painting
become in an observer's encounter with it? This wide-ranging selection of
texts emphasizes the coextensive work the viewer brings to painting
alongside the artist—the construction of form and meaning.
Barry Schwabsky is the art critic of
The Nation. He has been writing about art for the magazine since 2005, and his essays have appeared in many other publications, including
Flash Art (Milan),
Artforum, the
London Review of Books and
Art in America. His books include
The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art,
Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting and several volumes of poetry, the most recent being
Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail). Schwabsky has contributed to books and catalogs on artists such as Henri Matisse,
Alighiero Boetti,
Jessica Stockholder and Gillian Wearing, and has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, New York University, Goldsmiths College (University of London) and Yale University.
