Bête comme un peintre – Morgan Labar

Duchamp's adage "as stupid as a painter," hastily reduced to an anathema cast upon the painting of his time, served as a rallying cry for the artists who held sway over the art world and the columns of Artforum in the 1970s and who considered the death of painting a foregone conclusion—or at the very least, its dialectical transcendence.

The art of the 1980s emerged as a violent reaction to this scholarly narrative of modernity. Painting returned to the forefront after a decade of (relative) purgatory. Anti-intellectualism was asserted as a joyful and exhilarating antidote to conceptual austerity.

In this presentation, Morgan Labar will revisit this decade of painting by combining the history of exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Documenta) with an exploration of several movements that cultivated stupidity in painting (Figuration Libre, Bad Painting, Mülheimer Freiheit).