The Artists: What Is a Painting Now? 
TMH’s program lineeup has previously linked the painter of gestural genius Judit Reigl with the iconoclastic performance artist Carolee Schneemann, who, like Oppenheim, roots her work in Cézanne (albeit from a feminine perspective, as in her book Cézanne, She was a Great Painter [1976]). Matter of Masters includes Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses photo series with her cats, but in its 2005 filmic montage that layers Cézanne-like surface tension. Next to Schneemann, Reigl’s 1970s Drap/décodage (Drape/Decoding), reverse imprints of her Homme/Man series of the same period, underscore the innovations of both artists. Schneemann constructs her “painting that moves” from still photography, and Reigl takes a risk and abandons brush strokes in favor of an all-in-one transfer that blends printmaking, sculpture, and painting. 

Purposefully nonspecific about medium in his renderings of portraits, objects, and scenes, Craigie Horsfield creates poetic materiality with black and white or color inks on paper, wood, fresco support, or as tapestries. Originating in the camera or in camera-less negatives, his unique liminal prints unsettle our notions of photography and advance the possibilities of futuristic nongestural painting, Hilarius Hofstede returns to Matter of Masters with his particular hands-off medium: LP cover assemblage. Like his 1990s Ocean in shades of biospheric blue,  Reach the Beach, 2017, embraces a unifying color spectrum, in this case light-reflective browns (en brunaille). The mural thus washes in references to 12^th-century stained glass, 17^th-century painting techniques, and 20^th-century pop art to bring us to the question of the 21^st century’s slipping sands of physical and perceptual security.