Skip to main content

Neo-Expressionism

Then and now

Wes Hill
Eyeline 88
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

How should we think about the legacy of neo-expressionism? At its height in the early 1980s it represented a shift in the direction of vanguard art, away from conceptualist deconstructions, feminist politics and anti-aesthetic dematerialisations, which, in the 1970s, had rendered figurative gestural painting as retrograde modernism. Encompassing ‘Neue Wilden’ in Germany and ‘Transavanguardia’ in Italy, neo-expressionism might have absorbed the influence of a prior generation’s experiments in painterly performance art, but the movement’s concurrence with the revitalisation of international art markets in the late ’70s and early ’80s, signalled a conservative turn, towards what the general public would have recognised as age-old artistic interests in authenticity, individuality, intuitive expression and the weight of history.

For its sceptics, neo-expressionism’s challenge to the reign of conceptual practice centred on its coupling of fantasy and commodification; its artists merely supplied a multinational art market’s thirst for stylistic differences, and for romantic sentiments that made no clear political demands. For its champions, the movement symbolised the very human desire to shirk all labels, or at least to defy categorisation, vacillating between expression and scepticism, individuality and pastiche, history and myth, taste and tastelessness, raw punk and neo-romantic new wave. To add to the confusion, painters as diverse as David Salle, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel, Markus Lüpertz, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz were grouped together in spite of their divergent individual and cultural sensibilities, allowing the movement to be repudiated by those opposed to its spiritualism as well as its cynicism.

Neo-expressionism’s inclusion of graffiti artists—and, via the Bronx-based gallery Fashion Moda, its leveraging of the politics of street art more generally—meant that, for some, the movement conveyed marginalisation and ‘street-smarts’. However, many of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Georg Baselitz,Im Wald (In the forest), 1990.

Georg Baselitz,Im Wald (In the forest), 1990. Oil on canvas, 290 x 260cm. Purchased 1992 with funds from the 1991 International Exhibitions Program. Collection Queensland Art Gallery.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran,In The Beginning, 2016

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran,In The Beginning, 2016.Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.