Artists: Clémentine Adou, Wilfrid Almendra, Bo Bartlett, Vija Celmins, Ryosuke Kumakura, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Matthew Metzger, Julie Poitras Santos, Miao Wang

This is an exhibition of paintings that do many things at once. Many of them are monochromes—a genre associated with the apex of modernism and proclamations of the “death of painting” in the mid-20th Century—or at least they seem to be at first. Look closer, and these paintings may tell you they are also many other things: skyscapes, windows, screens. Other paintings resemble trompe l’œil, an illusionistic genre of painting dating to the Renaissance and seemingly the monochrome’s opposite, or perhaps even photorealism. Look closer, and they nonetheless have much to say about abstraction, framing, and other modernist concerns. This is also an exhibition of sculptures, prints, collages, and a film that trespass on painting, that may in fact be paintings when viewed from the right perspective.

This is an exhibition of difficulty. Not just the formal difficulty of objects that refuse to be just one thing—abstract, realist, painting, photography, sculpture, film—but psychological and political difficulty. The artworks in this exhibition grew from experiences of displacement, loss, tragedy, war, oppression, death, and all manner of catastrophes. They also grew from love, wonder, and everyday moments of beauty and tenderness. The formal complexity of these artworks—the way in which they inhabit multiple histories of painting, multiple media, and multiple genres—mirrors their emotional complexity. Often quietly, these artworks hold diverse, sometimes conflicting emotions, and ask us to look closely and long enough to bear witness to their affective intricacy.

This is an exhibition about the state of contemporary painting and the status of painting as a critical and conceptual practice. It is also an exhibition about something older than art itself: the sky. Omnipresent, unremarkable, potent, sublime, divine, and occasionally frightening, for thousands of years artists have turned their eyes upwards, searched for something, and transformed that experience into art. This is an exhibition about what happens because the sky is blue.

~ Grant Wahlquist

Because the Sky is Blue is supported by the Roxanne Quimby Foundation, the Susanne Marcus Collins Foundation, Harriet F. Hubbard, generous donors to CMCA’s Suzette McAvoy Exhibition Fund, and Etant donnés, a program of Albertine Foundation and Villa Albertine. The exhibition’s catalogue is supported by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.