Skarstedt is delighted to present our summer exhibition in New York, featuring a group of artists who all came to prominence within the context of the 1980s: Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, David Salle, and Christopher Wool. Although working within distinct iconographic styles, each artist shares a common interest in concepts of appropriation, technological experimentation, popular culture, and more while retaining traces of the artist’s hand, visually illustrating their shared roles in the reinvigoration of painting as a medium. The ideas first explored in their early careers have sustained each artist throughout their now decades-long practice, exemplified through the works on view, which date from the mid-1980s until the present day.
Works by Fischl, Koons, and Salle, for instance, experiment with photography and Photoshop to subsequently create hand-painted compositions that speak to various themes. These include the isolation of modern American suburbia, as in Fischl’s Late America series; the oversaturation of our media age, as in Koons’s Easyfun-Ethereal series; or the nuanced meanings of juxtaposed images, as in Salle’s Tree of Life series. Often using found imagery culled from glossy magazine advertisements, film, or other pop culture references, alongside their own photography, these paintings operate in concert with the joke painting by Richard Prince included in the exhibition. In these paintings, Prince continues to explore the boundaries of appropriation and the readymade through various iterations of found jokes—exemplified here through his Monochromatic Jokes—which marked a decisive turning point in his career. The joke’s presence on the canvas calls forth notions of seriality, authorship, and mechanical reproduction while simultaneously questioning the notion of “real” painting by engaging in a humorous dialogue with the “high” art of the twentieth century. Similar ideas arise in Christopher Wool’s Word Paintings, where stenciled text asks viewers to consider the premise that both words and painting are ultimately unfixed and arbitrary. Meanwhile, an example of his Patterned Paintings from the mid-1980s sees Wool, like Prince, experimenting with the readymade by using paint rollers instead of traditional artist brushes. With the design pre-determined by the roller, these paintings shy away from specific subject matter and form and instead embrace multiplicity and evoke a kind of hypnotic tension.