DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY:
SEVEN PAINTERS IN THEIR PRIME
Curated by Robert Storr

February 2 - August 2, 2019

RILEY BREWSTER
DENZIL HURLEY
JOHN OBUCK
NATHLIE PROVOSTY
REBECCA PURDUM
JOYCE ROBINS
ANDREW SPENCE

The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by Robert Storr. The exhibition catalogue includes an essay by Storr in which he states:

“Resnick and Passlof are generally referred to as Abstract Expressionists. With good reason. But that is not all they were. Meaning that as artists they were always exploring their own unique and sometimes maverick intuitions…Neither Resnick nor Passlof viewed themselves as representatives of a movement or as exponents of an aesthetic ideology.

Neither are the painters in this group. Nor are they in any sense followers or fellow-travelers of Resnick and Passlof. The one thing that all have in common, and share with the patrons of this new institution, is that they have been committed painters during periods when painting has died a thousand deaths in the No-man’s-land between warring critical factions claiming to have grasped art history’s ultimate destiny and competing to speak with the authority such foresight supposedly confers, that is to say anti-aestheticians as well as defenders of the old-time religion of modern art.

But as anyone who has attempted to master this polymorphous and mercurial medium learns sooner or later, painting’s ends are inherently unpredictable, and nothing accomplished along the way to any provisional understanding of its direction is fixed or final. The point of painting is not so much to make definitive statements as to see what seems necessary or even possible in the given creative, existential and historical moment. That, surely, was the underlying conviction of most of Resnick and Passlof’s contemporaries…So it is with this roster of seven mid-career painters: Riley Brewster, Denzil Hurley, John Obuck, Nathlie Provosty, Rebecca Purdum, Joyce Robins, and Andrew Spence. The purpose of gathering such very different artists together at this point is to see how widely their work actually fans out and how rich and suggestive are its many vectors.”