Preparing for Darkness / A New Movement in Contemporary Painting, Vol. 2

Four years after “Preparing for Darkness. A New Movement in Contemporary Painting” has debuted, almost sold out, and scattered across the globe, it makes sense to present a new iteration. Another good reason is its namesake exhibition, curated in 2024 at Museum Kampa in Prague—beautifully situated on the shores of the Vltava River. As the 8th edition of the series, it felt like its preliminary climax. This volume offers various images of the exhibition and its pieces, along with a comprehensive collection of works by participating painters. In a way, this book could act as a catalogue of the exhibition at Museum Kampa.

Over the least years I’ve stumbled across a number of exceptional new painters (no less than three of them are from Italy), all of which are presented in this volume as a contentious supplement to the existing selection. Again, I have largely focused on European painters, and I would like to continue on that road to suggest a fundamentally new reception of contemporary painting that prioritizes admiration of, and new perspectives on, their painterly quality. The paintings presented in this volume are capable of drawing viewers into deep emotional discourse and could be defined as melancholically influenced “Power Plants of Resistance”—or at least they are tinged in such a manner. Their meaning lies in their aura. They elicit an intense, focused dialogue that resurrects art historical narratives in entirely organic and “believable” ways. The selection of images in this volume transmits a different and restrictive understanding of painting that could be interpreted as a counterproposal to established modes of reception. That is, it counters a reception of contemporary painting that is defined by its limitless, barely comprehensible (maybe even completely arbitrary?) allocation of sense and meaning. The possibility of astonishment about these artists’ painterly, stylistic, and intellectual skills also turns those usually looked down upon as helpless amateurs into a serious, autonomous recipients.

In preparing for this publication, I noticed that a considerable number of these paintings are from the Czech Republic. Perhaps this isn’t a coincidence considering that Prague has hosted a number of significant exhibitions beyond my own: Michaël Borremans’s solo exhibition or the exhibition “Nightfall” (including, amongst others, Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man), both at Galerie Rudolfinum. In a sense, the artists presented in this work advance the gravitational pull of these influential contemporary painters in that a crucial part of their perception is their highly individualized melancholia that is capable of preparing us for darkness through a concentrated reflexive retreat into ourselves—if only to keep an ever-darkening world at bay.

Uwe Goldenstein