On the State of Painting - A series of four artists’ panels curated by Saul Ostrow

Panel 1 — Painting’s Limits

Moderator: Gwenaël Kerlidou
Panelists: James Hyde, David Humphrey, Ethan Ryman

Painting has repeatedly been defined through distinctions between itself and what it is not: image, sculpture, architecture, performance. Yet these borders have continually been tested by artists whose work occupies the unstable space between painting and its others. The issue, however, is not simply whether painting can expand, but what is at stake when its limits are redrawn, suspended, or refused.

Where does painting hold, and where does it give way? Rather than defending its borders, what happens when those borders become unstable? What fails first when we try to say what painting is: material categories, perceptual habits, historical assumptions, or institutional conventions? And if painting no longer has a fixed essence, what provisional criteria allow us to distinguish an expansion of its possibilities from its absorption into other forms?

Are painting’s limits located in paint, support, surface, frame, scale, or objecthood—or in the particular relations these establish among making, display, and spectatorship? When painting enters into relation with sculpture, architecture, or performance, does it become something else, or can those encounters disclose operations that painting’s conventional categories have concealed? Are its limits still criteria through which painting can be recognized, or have they become unresolved conditions through which it continues to operate?