CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/20/2015

The Forever Now

"Igitur" (2008), by Charline von Heyl, is reproduced from The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, published to accompany the MoMA exhibition closing April 5. Curator Laura Hoptman writes, "Contemporary artists working atemporally choose to reanimate, reenact, or sample from the history of modernism in part because of this aura of perpetuity, the durability of which their paintings, in a way, test. Certainly they relieve geometries and gestures, monochromatic surfaces and glyphs, of modernism’s burden of progress and liberate them from the chronological conveyer belt that may or may not have ground to a halt in the era of postmodernism, some thirty years ago. But instead of emphasizing the pastness of these styles or, for that matter, their future significance, atemporal artists challenge them, without a trace of parody or a soupçon of nostalgia, to be relevant again in our “endless digital Now,” as William Gibson has described our time. Counter to the fear of chronological malaise that atemporal tendencies in culture strike in the hearts of some, this is a hopeful, even invigorating quest, one that encourages artists to explore a vast, synchronic landscape of information in search of a broader, bolder notion of culture."