ACTION (UN)PACKED: ABSTRACTION AFTER ACTION
The inaugural exhibition of Commonspace brings together a number of emerging American painters engaged in investigating the inheritance of Action Painting at the opening of the twenty-first century. This packed salon style exhibition attempts to trace new strategies of speed, viscosity, virtuosity, geometricism, color vibration and mixed vocabularies of every kind that fall beyond the stratagems of neo-modernism and postmodernism. Action (un)Packed showcases painting practices that aren’t afraid of complexity or abjection, beauty or the ridiculous, but that actively demonstrate a dynamic negotiation between disparate regimes of pictorial signification. The defining question of this survey is whether or not we are qualitatively after Action painting or whether living in a hyperbolic economy of accelerated effects hasn’t engendered a certain degree of generosity toward the affect of Action painting once again – and if so, what defines its conditions of possibility today?