For at least the past 5 years many of today's would be painters/wall art practitioners have been basically raiding the playbooks written by Supports/Surfaces and Greenberg's Color Field painters (BTW Greenberg's personal collection is at the Portland Art Museum). Both were interested in the structure and delivery of medium, though Surfaces/Supports had a more political underpinnings. The clones tend to make work that looks like tarps or studio drop cloths or what Jerry Saltz described as Zombie Abstraction. The original stuff was way better and isn't about playing what I call the, "false humility of medium card."


Surfaces/Supports at Canada

Lately, Surfaces/Supports have received a lot more attention including Yesterday's article in Art in America by Raphael Rubenstein and an earlier one by Hyperallergic.

I'd like to see today's would be surface-supporters get a bit more ambitious because knowing the past, not just for its style... but its rigor should be on any painter's must research list.