Index: Painting

SoLA Gallery is honored to present Index: Painting, an exhibition curated by Ron Linden in conjunction with TransVagrant, a collective of artists, writers and arts advocates that Linden founded to produce exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles. Index: Painting will open with a public reception at SoLA Gallery on Saturday, April 13 from 4-7 PM and will be on view through May 11, 2019.

Index: Painting is curated by Linden to be more than a show, but a thoughtful study focused on the medium of painting viewed through a postmodern lens. Postmodern art is described as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, when painting ironically dominated the landscape, as well as an artistic description of the period that followed modernism’s dominance in cultural theory and practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.

Linden is particularly interested in conveying through the works of his collective choice of artists, including his own recent work, how painting is making a vital comeback in today’s varied and inconsistent contemporary art environment. His choice in the word “index,” which is “something that can be used for measuring how a situation is changing,” combined with postmodern ideas of skepticism, irony and philosophical critiques of concepts like universal truths and objective reality, signifies Linden’s hope to show how painters today are taking different approaches to breathe new life into a genre that's stealthily reclaiming its place in the limelight.

“As a curator, or organizer of exhibitions, I feel it my responsibility to present the work of artists I respect and admire,” says Linden. “With regards to painting, I always thought Philip Guston said it best: ‘Painting is impure. It's the adjustment of these impurities which forces painting's continuity.’”

With Index: Painting, Linden also hopes to shine a spotlight on how issues such as the global financial crisis, ever-present threats to security, accelerated developments in science and technology and a widening division between rich and poor, are uncannily reminiscent of the original modernist agenda. Nevertheless, “art has and always will have a unique ability to help us make sense of a rapidly changing world,” expresses Linden. “Artists today strive toward an articulate response to current existential crises, an alternative way of thinking through seeing.”