The Audacity of Paint features work by contemporary American artists whose primary medium is paint. The exhibition includes work by Sally Egbert, Julia Jo, and Sue McNally, celebrating the resiliency and power of paint as a medium in the context of the AI tsunami in which we live. Within this technological milieu, paint persists with its sensual qualities and malleable, human mark-making – audacious not only in its refusal to defer to digital modes, but also in its ability to express impractical joy. Audacious like Woody Guthrie’s guitar and like the artists themselves, who dare to paint “at a time like this.”
The 114th is a return to the origins of the Annual Exhibition. For the first 50 years of the series, exhibitions were made up almost entirely of paintings. Since then, exhibitions have highlighted the expanding breadth of media practiced by contemporary American artists. The Audacity of Paint is the first Annual in almost 30 years to focus exclusively on painting.