American Artists On View At the Whitney

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, said, "The Biennial is a great tradition that goes back to the Museum’s earliest roots. This gathering of new and established artists plunges us into the present moment in American contemporary art while simultaneously anticipating the future. Perhaps the Whitney’s defining exhibition, the Biennial is a requisite, periodic report from the front. It’s a means of discovery and of recognition, and a reaffirmation of the Museum’s commitment to American artists and to America’s cultural life. We are deeply grateful to Altria, Banc of America Securities, and The Brown Foundation for helping to make this year’s Biennial possible." The exhibition incorporates an extensive film and video program, comprising hand-processed films, documentaries, performative film presentations, and narrative works by three generations of filmmakers and artists, from Jonas Mekas and Bradley Eros to Liisa Roberts, Andrea Bowers, and James Fotopoulos. The Biennial also features new performances by artists including Marina Abramovic, Antony and the Johnsons, Noemie Lafrance, and Los Super Elegantes.

An Intergenerational Conversation

Several generations of artists are featured in the exhibition, in a conversation that reflects a number of overlapping trends:
An engagement with the artmaking, popular culture, and politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s;
The construction of fantastic worlds, uncanny spaces, and new narrative forms, often incorporating psychedelia, the Gothic, and the apocalyptic;
A prevalence of abstract and figurative paintings and drawings as well as hand-processed films, frequently involving obsessive working of line, surface, and image.
Ranging from the apocalyptic to the ethereal, the fantastic to the political, and the sensual to the obsessive, many of the works convey an underlying sense of anxiety and uncertainty about the world today. The Biennial artists have drawn from a variety of sources including music, pulp fiction, the occult, recent and past art history, cinema, and current political events. A direct engagement with materials and process, paralleled by an embracing of ornament and surface, is evident throughout the show, which includes strong groupings of painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, video, filmmaking, photography, performance, and digital art.