CategoriesStyles and Movements
Bad Painting
Deliberately awkward, clumsy or crude figurative painting that treats bad taste and lack of polish as a source of freedom.
No works indexed yet · 6 related artists
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About
In 1978, soon after Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in New York, she organised an exhibition titled “Bad” Painting, quotation marks included. It brought together painters who ignored the cool restraint of Minimalism and Conceptual Art and made figurative pictures that looked wrong by conventional standards: flattened perspective, garish colour, cartoon drawing and personal, often comic, subjects.
The name came to describe a wider attitude. William Copley had long painted bawdy, cartoonish figures under the signature CPLY, and in California Joan Brown laid on thick, bright paint in autobiographical scenes. Neil Jenney painted loose, sketchy pairings of figures and things with plain, literal titles. In 1980s Germany Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen pushed deliberate ineptitude further as a form of irony and critique. Look for hesitant or clumsy drawing, uncomfortable colour and a refusal of good taste; the awkwardness is chosen rather than accidental.
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