The Indiscipline of Painting was an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to 2012. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, it considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years. It goes on to demonstrate the way in which the history and legacy of abstract painting continues to inspire artists working today.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brought together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside other perhaps lesser known artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré, Mary Heilmann and Jeremy Moon.

Catalogue available from Tate Publishing and Cornerhouse 

Catalogue designed by Stefi Orazi

Catalogue Edited by Martin Clark, Sarah Shalgosky Daniel Sturgis, with texts by Daniel Sturgis Read and Terry R Myers, Alison Green, Bob Nickas, and Stephen Mooney.