The first book to examine the role of unconventional tools in contemporary painting is required reading for anyone interested in painting’s recent past and future.
Painting, often regarded as the oldest of art forms, has been repeatedly declared “dead.” In this unique exploration such notions are thoroughly dismantled, as technical art historian Pia Gottschaller demonstrates how painters radically reimagined the medium in the years following World War II. No longer content to limit themselves to the paintbrush in their search for new types of expression, artists began to experiment with new methods, employing found, fabricated, and repurposed objects—as varied as an Afro comb, the human body, and a robotic airbrush—to create paintings unlike any seen before, revolutionizing the course of art history.
Beginning with Jackson Pollock and the Gutai Art Association in Japan, Gottschaller traces the transformation of painting across the globe from the postwar era to the present day before turning to in-depth explorations of the work of thirty-eight contemporary painters, including Amoako Boafo, Helen Frankenthaler, Yves Klein, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Howardena Pindell, Kazuo Shiraga, and Andy Warhol. Richly illustrated with over 240 images of artists and their creations, Unruly Tools is the first study of this kind and offers essential testimony to painting’s continued vitality and reinvention.