Contemporary Painting in Exposition Space: “Unpacking” Practice

Abstract

Contemporary paintings are becoming more noticeable as a part of gallery exhibitions, curatorial projects, independent and commercial biennials. Various options of mounting and layouts of non-stretched canvas become more popular. This non-standard display of painting is considered in the article as a marker of a certain institutional and artistic adoption. It can be interpreted as an experience of assimilation of painting into the new art media in the environment of modern exhibition complex. The origins and main methods of transformation of the pictorial basis during 20^th – early 21^st centuries and their possible historical prototypes are analyzed in the article. The theory of modern representation is considered, which allows us to correlate the categories of distance and presence, significant for the art of the 20^th century, with the idea of the abstract as a manifestation of the objectivity of works of art and the art media themselves. Unsaturation of plastic manifestations and the expansion of symbolic meanings, relevant for the art of the first quarter of the 21^st century, are reflected in stylistic preferences of metamodern. Informal methods of display can be interpreted as a trigger and experience of temporary, playful reformatting — semantic “unpacking”. The author of the article notes the liminal position of painting in the contemporary art space. Transitional forms of non-conventional representation testify to the active search for the ways of integration of contemporary painting into contemporary art media.