Travel Pick: Art and Archaeology in Austria
Bad Painting - good Art

Bad painting is the critique of painting expressed with its own most essential means: Many of the most important painters of the 20th century like Francis Picabia, René Magritte, Asger Jorn, Philip Guston, Neil Jenney, Georg Baselitz, Albert Oehlen or Julian Schnabel radically called their medium into question using different strategies of incorrect, faulty, ugly or angry painting in order to open up new possibilities for the medium. Using prominent works by 21 artists, the exhibition presents “bad painting” as a phenomenon which opens a new and differentiated perspective on the history of painting since the beginning of modernism which today still influences contemporary discourse.

The exhibition leads up to current “bad painting” positions, including John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. They assail the American canon of values of decency, decorum, “good taste” and beauty in a way which is often condemned as shocking, sensationalist, “politically incorrect”and “reactionary.”