From Beyond the Grave: Abstraction and Figuration in contemporary painting
- cherrydodd
- Jul 23
- 5 min read
The year is 1935, Kenneth Clark (then director of the National Gallery) has declared painting dead and its' future impossible. However, in 2025 painting is still very much thriving from beyond the grave buried for it. Despite all odds painting has survived the onslaught of image-based technology and like an undying star, burned bright into the landscape of 21st century art. However, to talk of contemporary painting in its current iteration we must first look back 11 years to the phenomena of Zombie Formalism.
Coined by Walter Robinson in 2014 the term 'Zombie Formalism' refers to what is more tastefully regarded as 'process centred abstract painting.' In Robinson's view what zombifies the formalism of the early 2010s is its revival of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic favour for works such as Jackson Pollock's. By 2014 Greenberg's once popular aesthetic judgement had fallen long out of favour and painting had moved beyond that of his favourite action painters. This is where Zombie formalism finds itself, a disfigured and disformed, a half human, half monstrous incarnation of its abstract predecessors executing a "simulacrum of originality." Whether this originality was simulacrum or not did not impact the mass appeal Zombie Formalism had to collectors. It's constant framing of itself as a new breed of painting executing unknown methods drew money from outside of the Art Market's expected field. It is this market attraction that made Zombie Formalism into the phenomena it was as it shifted the art market's focus from curators, institutions, and critics to the realm of collectors.
How did painting change then to appeal to this new market ? How does Painting stay relevant in a market based in consumption for personal collection over the opinion of those working within art institutions ? How does abstraction counterbalance figuration ? what role does figuration has when abstraction is championed ? These are questions I often ask myself on the rare occasion that I am painting (I must admit all this hoo-ha and hullaballoo around what painting is has really put me off) and I found myself coming to a somewhat satisfied answer during a gallery visit to Hauser and Wirth last November. The show in question was George Rouy: The Bleed Part I, Rouy's debut solo exhibition in the rather plush gallery on Saville Row. Rouy's work depicts the human body in a transient state. Not quite still and not quite moving they blur and emerge from abstract backdrops in a ghostly manner. The official gallery text neatly packages this as "pertaining a relationship between figure and void" and repeatedly speaks of Rouy navigating a tension between human existence and the fast-pace of our contemporary technological world.
I find Rouy's work striking in its encapsulation of contemporary human experience but I am even more struck by its form. When I think of the aesthetics and the amalgamation of art history in painting and what a chopped up Frankenstein-ed version of it all would look like - I think of Rouy. I also think of how whenever I am trying to describe a contemporary painting whether it is abstract of figurative or somewhere in between I am drawn to and informed by others use of monstrous vocabulary. Zombie, Frankenstein, Vampiric, gruesome, grotesque. monstrosity is the realm in which painting now sits. Perhaps Clark was right - perhaps true painting did die with the second-world war and here we are now left with the beast that refuses to lay in its grave. A second-coming that plagues humanity highlighting its faults, flaws and deepest secrets.
Now I could not possibly talk of contemporary panting without speaking of Amy Sillman. Consulting my well creased copy of her 2020 book Faux Pas we learn that Sillman actually rejects the idea of herself as a painter and she much prefers to refer to herself as a drawer. In her own words " A painter is like an eagle, a canny and noble bird who soars above us, doing something enlightened, getting the bigger picture. A drawer is like a beaver who builds a dam from the ground up stick by stick, without an overview, but just with an animal urge to keep going until the thing becomes a form." This notion of a certain primal, animalistic instinct aligning with her creative process is acknowledged by Sillman to come from a long line of human knowledge being divided into anthropomorphic categories. Before her Eagle vs. Beaver analogy came Manny Farber's White Elephant vs. Termite Art and before Faber came Archilochus' Fox vs. Hedgehog. Painting and art once again becomes defined by non-human attributes in this instance. If we take Eagle vs. Beaver as an absolute ruling on contemporary understanding of what it means to paint and what it means to draw, then quite frankly the whole thing becomes quite beautifully tops- turvy. If drawing is the steady building of form regardless of material, then, Sillman is a drawer, Rouy is a drawer even I myself can no-longer claim the title of painter as my own practice has been so heavily influenced by what is defined in Sillman's beaver, drawing, practice.
I do hope you can forgive the confusion of language, but I do think it proves the point. Our contemporary 2D art landscapes of drawing and painting have become so expanded that they have lost the once clear formal and material definitions that told us where drawing ended, and painting began. So, if I continue with my monstrosity metaphor and take it to an uncomfortable extreme, what we then see is that within the close and complex art family, first cousins drawing and painting have got to know each other’s substance and form on such an intimate level that we are now left staring at their incestuous offspring. (sweet-home-Alabama) A slightly disfigured, genetically confused being. A morphing of two close but different sources. The Frankenstein's monster of the contemporary age. It's beautiful, slightly confusing, often repulsing, and all-around provoking in its unnaturalistic stance.
For now, this is where I conclude my stance of contemporary painting. It is impure, it is obscene and at times downright outrageous for reasons just beyond grasp. It ventures into the unknown as something akin to Jeff Vandermeer's Crawler in Annihilation endlessly described, fascinating and terrifying but existing just beyond the realm of understanding and fathom.
Further Reading:
Amy Sillman, Faux Pas (specifically see Some Notes on Drawing), Athens Books, 2025.
Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, Fsg Originals, 2014
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