Is Painting a Language? Or is it Mud?

About

This course aims to undo conventional ways of describing and categorizing painting and to ask how language can become a generative tool in the studio—and when it has to step aside to let painting bodies act as and with matter.

As an object, painting has a material and linguistic problem: The painted thing will never be the thing itself. An image of mud, a sensitive curve; the painting body enacts the depiction of another body; a sign for a sign for a sign. Painting is troubled by language and bothered by naming. Abstraction is cramped by flatness, disembodiment, and repression; representation by illusion, figuration, and psychology. What if the material, formal and historical possibilities of painting are not fixed categories mapped onto the work but rather a toolbox for their own dismantling?

Course leader

Ulrike Müller/Evie K. Horton

Target group

Artists and students interested in the possibilities of painting beyond the conventional binaries.

Course aim

Students can expect a mix of visual and textual inputs, group conversations and individual consultation and contemplate the possibilities of painting beyond—and in the space between—conventional binaries such as concept vs. form, figuration vs. abstraction, depth vs. flatness, and observation vs. imagination. Participants will explore working with and against fixed categories with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of what they already do and how to develop a more capacious painting practice.

Fee info