Caption: left to right: Florian Meisenberg, Ian Cheng, Shazia Sikander, Chris Ofili, Bishahk Som, and Sarah Cain.
ADVANCED PRACTICE: EXPANDED PAINTING
PGFA 5303, CRN: 14564, CREDIT: 3
Monday 7:00-9:40pm
Taught by: Peter Rostovsky
Course Description
As one of the most enduring forms of art, painting offers the contemporary artist many avenues for personal, social, and philosophical inquiry, acting as a tool for critique, meditative ritual, and even emotional healing. However, what does it mean to critically engage painting at this complex moment? Do we define this practice through the medium of paint on canvas or, in a timely update, through digital, experimental, and conceptual approaches that reflect the mediated and tumultuous nature of our lived experience? Just as urgently, how do we continue to keep this besieged practice vital given its recurring deaths, rebirths, technical mutations, financialization, and dispersion through online media? This class is designed to further develop students as advanced practitioners but also as thinkers in the ever-changing field of painting. Through a challenging sequence of prompts, critiques, discussions, field trips, and readings, students will be asked to work through some of the central problems and key debates energizing painting today. Our conversations will be framed by the work of Nina Chanel Abney, Michael Armitage, Ian Cheng, Chris Ofili, Chitra Ganesh, Wade Guyton, Hayv Kahraman, Florian Meisenberg, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jacolby Satterwhite, Pieter Schoolwerth, Avery Singer, Shahzia Sikander, among others, as well as by a range of artists working in film, graphic novels, and illustration. A course in conceptual and formal analysis and pragmatic project development interlacing analog, digital, and print media, this class will enable students to pursue painting on a more historically informed, socially engaged, and technically advanced level, with a keen eye on painting’s adaptation to and transformation within our turbulent screen-based world.
Faculty Bio:
Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist and writer, who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a political refugee in 1980. He works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation, digital art and comics. Known for his paintings that explore the sublime in the everyday, Rostovsky is equally committed to pursuing conceptual and collaborative work. Rostovsky’s many diverse projects attempt to bridge the gap between painting and conceptual art while remaining attentive to painting’s material and discursive history, and especially to its encounter with new technologies. His work has been shown widely in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, PS1/MoMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, the ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K. and a host of private galleries. While he also works in fiction and graphic narrative, his critical writing, often under the pen name David Geers, has been published in October, Fillip, BOMB, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Unbag and Frieze. Rostovsky currently teaches at NYU, Parsons New School and Lesley Art + Design.
