The Contemporary Scope: A Painting Show at Alexander Berggruen
Installation view of A Direct Response to Light: 21st Century Painting. Image courtesy the artists and Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Tucked away up several flights of stairs, Alexander Berggruen presents a new exhibition titled A Direct Response to Light: 21st Century Painting. The exhibition, curated by Dexter Wimberly, features the work of seven contemporary figurative painters: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Katherine Bradford, Hulda Guzmán, Heidi Hahn, Marcus Jahmal, Tajh Rust, and Nadia Waheed. The subject matter proposed by the exhibition’s title is colossal; a comprehensive look at painting in the 21st century would be an ambitious task for a full museum and perhaps an impossible one for a gallery. Yet Wimberly’s curation is successful in pinpointing several directions that contemporary figurative painting is moving, and the chosen works emphasize the vast aesthetic scope that exists in contemporary art today.
The gallery is split into two rooms, the foremost of which is dominated by the bright orange light of Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s Orange Figures in Orbit II (2025). The seven-foot-tall painting glows from within and depicts geometrically curving figures buried in swirling piles of leaves and shapes. The flatness of the color harkens to Matisse’s papier découpé, an inspiration behind Adeniyi-Jones’s work. Almost in the style of a playing card, the piece operates on a diagonal line of symmetry. Although the halves are not perfectly mirrored, there is a sense of meditated and intentional order. Adeniyi-Jones draws inspiration from the rich history of myth and ceremony that emerged from the West African coast. The curving and symmetrical figures possess an otherworldly quality, as does the brightly-hued world around them.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Orange Figures in Orbit II, 2025. Oil on canvas; 86 x 70 in (218.4 x 177.8 cm). Courtesy the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
In writing about his curatorial direction for 21st Century Painting, Dexter Wimberly warns of an era in which “technological innovations often relegate traditional art forms to the sidelines.” This issue has certainly been on everyone’s mind as of late, with Christie’s recently wrapping up its first sale dedicated exclusively to art made with AI. In response to these anxieties, Wimberly has brought together artists who “demonstrate that painting is anything but obsolete.” The difference between a human artist and an AI model—to put it simply—is that the human has lived. For Wimberly, this designates pieces that are concerned with identity and experience as those with humanity: a dynamic and irreplicable quality.
Walking into the second and larger room of Alexander Berggruen gallery, the work of Heidi Hahn captivates. Two large-scale works, each oil on linen, depict gargantuan and nearly abstract figures bent into sharp, angular positions. Untitled (With Affection) #2 (2025), is a deep olive green, which melts at the edges into a burnt brownish crimson. The head of a figure peaks through a gap in the arms, and the edge of the face is illuminated by a sharp bright light. On the face, one somber eye tips down into the crevice of the arm, which turns blue just before returning to the uniform green of the body.
Detail of Heidi Hahn, Untitled (With Affection) #1, 2025. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Photographs don’t adequately capture the liquid, nearly wet appearance of the canvas. In the conversation of human versus AI-produced art, materiality and physicality are essential pillars of the human-made. At the bottom of the canvas of Untitled (With Affection) #2, thick pools of hardened paint jut out into the third dimension. Details such as these, intentional or not, distinguish work which was made in the physical world. Its companion, Untitled (With Affection) #1, sits several feet away. Each work contains one isolated figure, and they are arranged so that the subjects seem to be fighting to stretch through the edges of their frames and reach one another.
Across the exhibition, the styles of the different pieces are disparate. From the flat geometrics of Adeniyi-Jones to the tenderly rendered narrative work of Tajh Rust, the detailed surrealist nature of Hulda Guzmán’s painting versus the ephemeral quality of Katherine Bradford’s figures, there is no single aesthetic cohesion. This variety is far preferable, however, to the monotone quality which so often plagues AI-rendered images.
Wimberly seeks not to bridge this survey of paintings under an overarching, sometimes overreaching aesthetic or conceptual sensibility, but instead identifies that the strength of contemporary painting lies within its plasticity and heterogeneity, offering us seven painters who he believes embody the current excellence of this traditional medium. Indeed, Wimberly has presented a collection of dynamic contemporary artists, furthering his case that painting will not be outdated anytime soon.
Installation view of A Direct Response to Light: 21st Century Painting. Image courtesy the artists and Alexander Berggruen, NY.
A Direct Response to Light: 21st Century Painting is on view at Alexander Berggruen from March 5 to April 9, 2025.
