Dennis Hollingsworth

Intimacy in Discourse: Unreasonable Sized Paintings

Today, Phong Bui moderated a roundtable discussion with nine artists from the over thirty he has curated into a huge show at the the School of Visual Arts Chelsea Gallery entitled Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable Sized and Unreasonable Sized Paintings. I snip from the announcement:

School of Visual Arts' Chelsea Gallery and Mana Contemporary, in collaboration with the Rail Curatorial Projects, co-present a two-part exhibition, "Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable Sized and Unreasonable Sized Paintings," curated by Phong Bui. Both are proposed experiments to explore the conditions that lead to the production of small paintings: how paintings' sizes are determined by different artists' conscious or unconscious intentions, and how those sizes, in turn, affect their relation to viewers in the various spaces that the artworks quietly occupy in contemporary visual culture.

According to Bui, both curatorial ideas were inspired by Jackson Pollock's admiration for Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose modestly sized paintings--such as "Moonlight Marine" (1870 - 90), which measures 11 ½ x 12"--evoke monumental scale and immensity of space, while Pollock's larger canvases attain a sense of intimacy. Such a subtle perception of how scale mediates our responses to images like these subsequently prompted Thomas Nozkowski's term "reasonable-size paintings," which describes his two standard sizes, 16 x 20" and 22 x 28", within which he has consistently worked since the early 1970s. The following two selections of painters were assembled to expand the dialogue surrounding this topic.

I took notes.