“Zombie Formalism” and Other Recent Speculations in Abstraction
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
School of Visual Arts, SVA Theatre, New York

Last April the painter and critic Walter Robinson wrote an essay for Artspace Magazine on a particular strain of contemporary painting, which he named Zombie Formalism. Others have similarly described work by the same group of mostly artists—among them Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Oscar Murillo, Parker Ito, Fredrik Vaerslev, and Dan Colen—as Crapstraction and MFA-Clever art. Laura Hoptman, in her catalogue for the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Forever Now, used synonyms such as hauntology, retromania, and super hybridity—phrases by an institutional curator aiming to appear hip.