”A painting must always move beyond its subject,” says British painter Michael Simpson, who sees the practice of painting as ”giving form to an idea.” Hear how he, David Hockney and 6 other painters work with the classical art form.

”I don’t think that the painter thinks about art when they’re making serious painting,” says Michael Simpson. ”What they’re doing is trying to solve a problem.” Those problems can be very different: American painter Kerry James Marshall’s paintings tackle the dominance of white bodies in art history. His paintings of black people aim to diversify the images we see in the museum: ”If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot,” says Marshall.

Moving from figurative to abstract painting, British painter Cecily Brown thinks about the qualities of paint itself: ”When the body disappears it’s almost like there’s no ’there’ there,” she explains. ”It just becomes paint showing off, doing tricks, playing games.” American painter Mark Bradford has moved away from paint itself and uses materials such as liquefied paper in his work, material that “has something to do with the social fabric of the times we live in, and not just to do with the history of art.”

Essentially, the strength of painting is its versatility, what Danish painter Tal R calls ”the magic” of the painting. One can always come back and re-experience a painting, says British painter Ian McKeever: ”All paintings, irrespective of when they were painted, still have this possibility for us to come to them anew, to actually see it for the first time.”

Also featured in this video is British artist David Hockney and Swedish artist Anna Bjerger.

Produced and edited by Roxanne Bageshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2017

Supported by Nordea-fonden

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