Liz Munsell

Contemporary art is a vast and complex field representing artists, ideas, and trends from every imaginable cultural and geographical background. This book introduces the art of our times by taking the reader through a tour of some seventy examples from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Thematic chapters present artistic categories, concepts, and propositions that have been prevalent since the mid-1950s and offer a path toward understanding the different subjects, forms, styles, purposes, and techniques of contemporary art. Some, such as `portrait’, are long-standing notions in the history of art; others, such as `site’ or `borrowed’, raise provocative questions and may be less immediately obvious. But it is the works of art themselves – brilliantly conceived by some of the most creative minds of our times – that make the case for embracing contemporary media in all its diversity.

An investigation of seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to challenge the boundaries of traditional figuration. Color is flexible and amorphous. It lends itself to infinite perceptions and refuses to be definitive. Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration discusses new work by seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to unsettle the figure. In painting, sculpture, and installation they push at and spill over the outermost limits of realism. Their high-key palettes and disorienting glow defamiliarize human and anthropomorphic forms, highlighting the figure’s manipulability and continual metamorphosis. These artists refute any fixed notions of the self and thwart reductive interpretations, generating space for resilient, transgressive, and exuberant bodies that cannot be placed or contained. In their work the artists take in and take on the oversaturation of our contemporary moment. They invoke surreal slippages between everyday horrors and their unbound imaginations. This multiethnic, multiracial, and multifaceted group of makers leverage palettes that reflect their cross-cultural allegiances and lived experiences—whether nodding to their respective heritages, to pop culture and digital immersion, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Modern and contemporary artists have long offered a counterpoint to strongholds within Western art history that have insisted on a muted palette as an indicator of purity, seriousness, and whiteness—since the Renaissance’s focus on linear perspective and recasting of classical sculpture in white. At a time of deep reconsideration of canons and institutions, this presentation reflects on how color has been othered—perceived as emotional, subjective, and secondary to line in importance. The artists in Overflow, Afterglow embrace color to push against such hierarchies. Taken together, their works convey today’s zeitgeist of frenzied too-muchness and all-at-onceness, in-betweenness and expansiveness, ultimately showing interlinked experiences across many spectrums. Distributed for the Jewish Museum Exhibition Schedule: Jewish Museum, New York (May 24–September 15, 2024)