The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting

by Barry Schwabsky, Rob Colvin (Editor), Sherman Sam (Editor)

A collection of writings on art by Barry Schwabsky. “Many consider Barry Schwabsky to be the critic on painting today, even if he does write copiously on other art forms,” write editors Rob Colvin and Sherman Sam in their foreword to this selection of Schwabsky's writings. Written since the turn of the millennium, the texts in The Oberver Effect include meditations on the broader context of painting today alongside reflections on such well-known American painters as Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, and Dana Schutz, as well as practitioners from Europe and beyond—Bernard Frize, Tal R, and Ha Chonghyun among them. As Colvin and Sam point out, the book “documents a dialogue between abstraction and the image” in which “images serve less to represent their described subject than to articulate the sort of painting each one desires to be.”

Genres: Art

320 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2020

About the author

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and the art critic for The Nation. His recent books include Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2017), Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2018), and Landscape Painting Now (DAP, 2019). He lives in New York.

Reviews

[Preston Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

came for the maureen gallace and dana schutz chapters, left with so much more than i could’ve anticipated — must read for painters everywhere