Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2019

This article considers the work of the late Swedish painter Dick Bengtsson. It is conceived in an attempt to locate Bengtsson’s complex use of surface beyond the discourse of ‘sign games’ that has largely surrounded his practice to date. In addressing the limitations of a postmodern agenda concerned with Bengtsson’s prowess as a particular type of conceptual artist, this article explores his use of materials within individual artworks to elucidate less developed dimensions within his production.

Review of: Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, Isabella Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (eds) (2016)

Berlin: Sternberg Press, 292 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-95679-007-2, p/bk, £13.95

Hopkins’ painterly abstraction reflects on a universe of disordering contingencies in everyday experience, questioning how painting can refer to such qualities of experience without engaging in representation. The immediate act of placing paint on the canvas extends to metaphorical concerns with process: how to maintain that sensation of immediacy if repetitions occur within a sequence of gestural responses. Hopkins’ work adopts different approaches at different stages; degrees of immediacy remain a consideration while attachment to a variety of motifs develops. Paintings remain continuously open to change as more reflexive approaches to the ironies of maintaining immediacy in re-presentation emerge. Resources are both visual and philosophical: the questioning of logic with ‘associationism’ found in the writings of David Hume and influencing Lawrence Sterne, a fascination with Spanish painting and its influence on Robert Motherwell, who was in turn influenced by A. N. Whitehead.