postpainting

Postpainting is a term used in contemporary art criticism to describe practices that move beyond traditional painting while retaining painting-oriented concerns such as surface, color, and mark-making. It designates works that blur the distinction between painting and other media, incorporating sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, or digital processes, or that reframe painting as an idea rather than a single object.

Origin and scope: Unlike movements with fixed canons, postpainting is not a formal style but a provisional category used to discuss certain tendencies in late 20th- and 21st-century art. The term frequently appears in curatorial catalogs and critical essays addressing how artists revisit painting’s history while dissolving its traditional hierarchy. It often signals a push to rethink what a painting can be in an expanded field of practice.

Characteristics: Key tendencies include cross-media hybrids, process-based production, openness to chance, and modular or site-specific formats. Works may foreground material experimentation, layering, transparency, or abrasion, challenging the notion of a finished, autonomous painting. The viewer’s spatial and sensory engagement can become part of the work, blending boundaries among painting, sculpture, and environment.

Methods: Artists may combine stretched canvas with sculptural elements, project light or video onto painted surfaces, incorporate textiles or found objects, or employ digital imaging and algorithmic repetition. Some postpainting works function as paintings within immersive installations, while others emphasize sculptural or architectural aspects of a work.

Reception: Scholarly reception is varied. Postpainting is praised for expanding painting’s possibilities and material inquiry, while critics debate its definitional clarity and longevity, given its fluid, industry-wide application.

See also: Post-Painterly Abstraction, installation art, mixed media, neo-avant-garde, contemporary painting.