Expert Series: On “50 Paintings”

Join Nigel Cooke, Byron Kim, Barry Schwabsky, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, artists and art critics who contributed to the 50 Paintings catalogue, for a conversation about painting and the importance of survey exhibitions. Their discussion is moderated by the exhibition’s co-curators, Margaret Andera, senior curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Michelle Grabner, artist, curator, and Crown Family Professor of Art and Chair of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”

This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

About the Experts

Nigel Cooke is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics. Since the late 1990s, Cooke has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting, creating a highly diverse and distinctive body of work. More recently, his work has assessed this output, moving into a succinct language with which to investigate his wide range of interests. His paintings are held in several of the world’s major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Tate Gallery (London, UK), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and Astrup Fearnely Museet for Moderne Kunst (Oslo, Norway).

Byron Kim often works in an area one might call the abstract sublime. His work sits at the threshold of abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. His ongoing series of Sunday Paintings, in which he records the appearance of the sky every week, continually contrasting the cosmos with the artist’s life, both always changing. This project, which numbers over a thousand paintings and has endured over 20 years, is very much influenced by the work of On Kawara. Kim is perhaps best known for his painting Synecdoche, which was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Comprising a grid of hundreds of panels depicting human skin color, the work is both an abstract monochrome and a group portrait.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2017) and The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2019), as well as the poetry collections Feelings Of And (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023).

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung was born in 1975 in Los Gatos, CA, and lives and works in Connecticut. She received her MFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is included in the collections of The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), DePaul University Art Museum, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Recent exhibitions include Jennifer Jason Leigh at Corbett vs. Dempsey; Whitney Biennial 2014 (New York, NY); Painter, Painter at the Walker Art Center, (Minneapolis, MN); The Program at ReMap4 (Athens, Greece); Michelle Grabner: I Work From Home at MOCA Cleveland (Cleveland, OH); Shakti at Brand New Gallery (Milan, Italy); and a solo exhibition, Chlorophyll Bluess at Diana Lowenstein (Miami, FL).

The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to our exhibition sponsors.

Image: Rebecca Morris (American, b. 1969), Untitled (#04-22) (detail), 2022. Oil and spray paint on canvas. 66 × 67 in. (167.6 × 170.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. Image courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo by Lee Tyler Thompson