The title of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art presents a spin on the old question about the artist’s proper response to war: What does it look like to paint a void? You could reconceptualize the loss created by World War II, for instance, as an act of creation—the war didn’t just coincide with the birth of the nuclear age but served as midwife to it. Abstract artists in the postwar era responded not just by painting the void but by literally attacking the canvas to reveal what was behind it. Which turned out to be nothing—a wall. The back of a canvas.
Niki de Saint Phalle, in the vibrantly colored Shooting Painting American Embassy, attached bags of paint to a backboard and shot them with a gun, relinquishing control over the project’s outcome but creating a work of surprising beauty anyway. Alberto Burri—a medic in the Italian army who began his painting career in a Texas prison, as a POW—used a blowtorch to create works of melted plastic that bring to mind industrial disaster or nuclear holocaust. (There’s a video of Burri at work that you see and think, “Wow, that must smell terrible.”) Elsewhere, Burri’s stitched and painted burlap sacks, in shades of brown and gold, look like aerial shots of fallow fields—or the view from a bomber plane. More direct claims to violence—like Shiraga’s or Metzger’s—aside, the show gains power from the works’ abstraction: where no horror is specified, the viewer is free to imagine it.
Through 6/2, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago.org, $12, Tuesdays free for Illinois residents.
