I wasn't aware that modernism welded anything shut, though certain
modernists placed constraints on themselves, and some wrote manifestos.
Nerdrum is certainly successful, but I think there's not much there
there. Two painters who use the conventions and techniques of
classical European realist painting more tellingly are the late
Gregory Gillespie (check Google Images) and the young Mexican artist
Hugo Crosthwaite (http://www.hugocrosthwaite.com/, and an amazing
minidoc on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0guLRCtNTs).
Mark
At 11:54 AM 11/13/2008, you wrote:
>FP wrote: "You can use anything you want -
> abstraction, even cliche - as long as it is somehow
> recontextualized, revitalized."
>
>I agree completely. And isn't that, in a nutshell, the definition of
>post-modernism? Such is the case in the visual arts. Out with the long
>list of reductive verbotens; to hell with the strictures, fling open the
>gates that Modernism so systematically welded shut. All that matters is
>whether it works, whether it breathes Anything is possible. Corpses can
>be resurrected. Odd Nerdrum, as Dr Frankenstein, appalled his professors in
>the 1970s by painting like a seventeenth-century master. 'You can't paint
>in that dead style', they told him, and threw him out of the university.
>But across Europe, shows of his 'dead' paintings became sold-out sensations.
>Walking into a gallery of his paintings can cause immediate & permanent
>re-orientation.
>
>bj
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