52 CRITICAL PAINTERS
52 Critical Painters highlights artists pushing the practice of painting forward. Artists who have developed a voice, carved out a corner, imagined a vision, or set themselves apart.
Arvie Smith
Arvie Smith makes large scale phantasmagoric oil paintings that reference everything from American racial stereotypes, contemporary politics, historical events, to narrative and art-historical tropes.
Ann Gale
Ann Gale is an artist and educator widely revered among painters but less recognized commercially. For years she has mentored a new generation of painters at the University of Washington while keeping a rigorous studio practice making highly observed perception-based oil paintings.
Evan Hudson
Artist Evan Hudson uses the "aesthetically familiar" material plasticine, or modeling clay, to construct naïve looking scenes that pack a sinister punch.
Anya Roberts-Toney
Anya Roberts-Toney is a painter of still lives, apparitions, feminine mystique, and cultural contradictions.
Howard Fonda
Portland artist Howard Fonda might best be descirbed as a painter-philosopher who uses his painting practice to contemplate themes of love, death, existence, and humanity.
David Schell
Portland artist David Schell makes paintings that utilize simple color and abstract forms to convey a discrete affect in each piece.
Jazz Brown
Jazz Brown is an artist working in geometric abstraction but with a softer, more painterly bent than typical.
Nadia Waheed
Nadia Waheed makes narrative paintings rich with color, metaphor, and iconography.
Daisy Patton
Daisy Patton's numerous bodies of work are all steeped in research and held together by a sincere concern for this planet and its inhabitants.
David Joel Kitcher
David Joel Kitcher uses intuitive mark making to construct abstract paintings, watching them unfold with each decision he makes.
Philippe Hyojung Kim
Philippe Hyojung Kim makes paintings and paint-made objects that get to the heart of paint-as-material, that gooey viscous stuff with which we make paintings.
Ilana Zweschi
Ilana Zweschi makes process-based paintings that seek to disarm documents of propaganda and harmful pronouncements.
Rithika Pandey
Rithika Pandey's surreal, dream-like paintings make heavy use of pattern and saturated, fauvist interiors.
Kendrick Corp
Kendrick Corp makes paintings that expose the inherent contradictions of American masculinity.
Robert Otto Epstein
The paintings of Robert Otto Epstein are vividly colored gridded compositions that call to mind 8-bit imagery and 90's computer software.
Cable Griffith
Seattle artist Cable Griffith is known for his dense, colorful, fantasy landscape paintings informed equally by nature and video games. They are flattened, expansive compositions with different land forms coming together in a single image.
Benjamin Terry
Artist Benjamin Terry makes playful paintings that use color and form to highlight longstanding painting traditions precisely by veering from them.
Ronald Hall
Artist Ronald Hall makes paintings that seamlessly blend figurative elements, painterly abstract passages, and post-pop art flourishes, into compositions that have the affect of a fever dream.
Caetlynn Booth
Artist Caetlynn Booth makes high chroma paintings full of patterns, reflections and hard edges.