ART-PRESENTATION:A New Spirit Then,A New Spirit Now 1981-2018

The exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting” (15/1-18/3/1981) at the Royal Academy in London, co-curated by: Norman Rosenthal, Christos M. Joachimides and Nicholas Serota, The exhibition attempted to sum up the state of painting at that point. It was an early response to the new currents that appeared in both painting and sculpture around 1980, and acted as a launch-pad that brought these developments to public attention.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive

In the exhibition “A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981 – 2018”, that is on presentation at Almine Rech Gallery in New York Norman Rosenthal reassesses this defining moment in his curatorial career with nearly 40 years of hindsight. The original exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting” challenged painting’s status as a ‘conservative’ medium by presenting a self-aware relationship between the artist, painted image, and reality. Rosenthal pushes this investigation even further in his new presentation, questioning the role of personal and collective memory in our conception of this moment. The majority of the artists presented in the exhibition are living and working today. In “New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now,1981-2018” are on presentation works by: Frank Auerbach, Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Rainer Fetting, Per Kirkeby, Maria Lassnig, Markus Lüpertz, Malcolm Morley, A.R. Penck, Pablo Picasso, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Julian Schnabel. In an interview that was published in Art In America Magazine in 23/9/2009, Norman Rosenthal was asked what was is the most important project he had worked on, answered “Without question the exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting”, which opened at the Royal Academy in January 1981… The exhibition, though not well received in London at the time, I really believe, changed the perception of contemporary art at the time on both sides of the Atlantic”. The term “New spirit painting” became used particularly in Britain and is useful in that it also embraces aspects of new painting at that time that do not fit quite comfortably into the category of neo-expressionism, such as the American painters David Salle and Eric Fischl and in Britain Paula Rego, Stephen McKenna, Steven Campbell and the abstract painter Sean Scully. In Britain particularly, the renewal of interest in painting in the early 1980s, especially figurative painting, brought into fresh focus the work of older artists such as Howard Hodgkin as well as those often called the school of London The term is virtually synonymous with neo-expressionism and its sub groups of Neue Wilden and Transavanguardia. “One thing it was turning down, much more than anything else, was the idea that the axis of New York and London was the only thing in art. The most significant thing about “New Spirit”, from my perspective, is that it was the beginning of an opening up. First Europe, then finally the whole world. Nobody at that point in history, even in Britain, thought that there was any art of significance being made in Germany, even less so in Paris, or in Italy. It just didn’t exist because nobody cared and nobody was really looking”, (Norman Rosenthal interview The Brooklyn Rail (15/7/14).

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 2/5-9/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com