Friday, 3 June 2016, 06–08 pm

When talking about painting today in German—and considering the problematic standing that painting had up to the 2000s, there is a remarkable amount of talk—one seldom dispenses with the definite article. Malerei (painting), which can be prosaically broken down into the technical arsenal of painting and the specialist knowledge of its constitution in regard to image media and concepts, has turned into ‘die’ Malerei (‘the’ painting). It approaches us as a downright substance that, because all kinds of working methods—and long not only those appearing as painting—can be attributed to it, transforms even that which needn’t necessarily be painting into painting. This marks the return of a question that has been raised since the 1980s with varying vehemence and from different angles, often more against than in favor of painting: Why painting now? Or in other words: What is the use of working with painting, of all things, under specific historical conditions, when the mere fact already implies acknowledgement, applause, and market success? What does it mean to paint, when ‘picture’, ‘painting’, and ‘art’ no longer stand in an imperative or even causal relationship? What effects does this have on the practice and discourse of painting, and how can one critically cope with it, when art increasingly suffices with competing with other visual industries merely for the scarce resource of attention?

Hans-Jürgen Hafner (born in 1972) works as an art critic, author, and curator and is currently the director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf. He has organized numerous monographic and thematic exhibitions, among others, on the relationship between art and the market, the impact of digitization on art, and alternative art-historical/curatorial modes of narration. In 2012 and 2013 he presented a first retrospective of the artistic oeuvre of the Concept Art pioneer, musician, and philosopher Henry Flynt at the Düsseldorfer Kunstverein and the ZKM Karlsruhe, thus providing a key piece of the mosaic in newly appraising artistic practices since the beginning of the 1960s that have been canonized as ‘conceptual’. Together with Gunter Reski, he is the author and editor of the text and picture anthology The Happy Fainting of Painting dealing with the recent history of painting. Hafner is currently working on a publication on Henry Flynt and the history of the reception of Concept Art.
Hafner regularly publishes contributions and reviews in Camera Austria, Frieze (d/e), Spike Art Quarterly, and Texte zur Kunst.

Image: Henri Gervex, Une séance du jury de peinture (1885), oil on canvas, 300 × 419 cm