For MoMA’s first contemporary painting survey in recent memory, curator Laura Hoptman pulled together work by 17 artists, most of whom work with various abstract formal vocabularies ranging from the expressionistic to the starkly minimal. Each artist has multiple, large-scale pieces on view; Kerstin Brätsch’s monumental works on paper encased in glass lean against the gallery entryway like laid-back bouncers. The premise of the exhibition, which also includes Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Joe Bradley and Rashid Johnson, is that contemporary artists continue to cull techniques from various 20th-century traditions, breathing new life into an old medium that appears more relevant than ever.
