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.
Anthony White
Anthony White makes supersaturated maximalist 'paintings' of the cheap consumer trash, luxury branded ephemera, and digitally mediated bodies that populate our ultra-capitalist post-internet reality.
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.
Amy Bernstein
Amy Bernstein is an artist heavily invested in the process of painting. She makes paintings on large canvases, composed of lyrical brushstrokes on a painstakingly smooth layer of white gesso.
Nadia Waheed
Nadia Waheed makes narrative paintings rich with color, metaphor, and iconography.
Kate Greatmochi Bae
Kate Greatmochi Bae is an artist moving painting forward with her process-based peeled acrylic forms.
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.
Gabrielle Jones
Australian abstract artist Gabrielle Jones makes paintings that appear like wild bouquets of brushstrokes— energy coalescing into amorphous fleshy forms.
Cynthia Cruz
The paintings of Cynthia Cruz are maximalist phantasmagoric scenes populated by weird bodies, alien creatures, and lots of decorative patterns.
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.