Cradle, 2023; Oil on canvas; 13” x 10” | 33 x 25.4 cm

Moreover: 50 Paintings is the sister exhibition to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s, 50 Paintings, contemporaneous exhibitions that together feature the work of one-hundred artists. Organized as a ‘survey,’ Moreover too celebrates contemporary painting’s pluralistic leanings while furthering comparative analysis in the visual language.

The curatorial field from which the paintings are selected draw from a concentrated Midwestern geography. While regionality is not on view, the works included in the exhibition esteem painting as a form of visual power: an elaboration of meaning and a force upon the world.

Painting’s many operations are on display: ambiguity, complexity, paradox, unity, emotionality, impressionism, narration, and subjectivity are ceaselessly negotiated with painting’s visual elements and design principles. Histories, styles, genres, and painting’s competencies abound. The exhibition’s openness can be embraced as a celebration of artistic independence and determination but also as a demonstration of painting’s imprudence and cultural influence.

Finally Moreover, like 50 Paintings asks us to consider not just ‘what we feel’ about paintings, but which painting’s ‘we feel with.’ A survey of this much material demands slow and repeated evaluation from its viewers. Yet the exhibition’s individual paintings must also create attachments in its viewers, bonds that “passionately link us to an array of ethical, political, intellectual or other bonds,” as literary critic Rita Felski suggests.