1999

Untitled

American, born 1955

The playful shapes on the surface of this painting are multicolored and irregular. Untitled shares none of the hard geometry of earlier abstract paintings by Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, or Gerhard Richter. Netsky subverts the austere angularity of his predecessors by using a very mundane material--melted lipstick--instead of paint. Still, the forms he creates refer to nothing specific. It is our associations with his medium that provide much of the work's content: Fascinated by the contemporary cultural obsession with fashion and vanity, Netsky transforms a cosmetic used to decorate the face into a medium for making a painting.