Cover image of the review
Travis MacDonald, untitled (noon), 2019, oil and bronze on linen. Courtesy of Niagara Galleries. Photo: Aaron Christopher Rees

Kate Wallace, Views to Remember, Travis MacDonald, Clock Face


23 Nov 2019
Kate Wallace, Views to Remember, c3 Contemporary Art Space 30 Oct - 29 Nov 2019 Travis MacDonald, Clock Face, c3 Contemporary Art Space 30 Oct - 29 Nov 2019

Not without irony did the late Annette Michelson, writing for the New York Herald Tribune in 1957, note for her American readers that the art of the modernist avant-gardes had become traditional. This she had concluded from her viewing of a set of Robert Delaunay's rhythmic abstract paintings, shown retrospectively in a post-war and post-occupation Paris. Read today, Michelson's statement about the repetitive tonalism of the Orphic abstractionist seems to predict the coming implications for generations of painters responding to modernism and locates a problem for how we might understand the work of art for some time. According to the martial logic of historical progessivism, painting was now in crisis with itself.

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