I remember being in the galleries at Museum of Modern Art for The Forever Now.
The exhibition, organized by my friend Laura Hoptman, brought together a group of painters whose work resists a clear sense of chronology. The premise—contemporary painting in an atemporal world—suggests something we feel but don’t always articulate: that artists today are not moving forward in a linear way, but working across time, drawing from multiple histories at once.
The catalogue reflects that idea. It includes Laura’s essay, which situates these practices outside of a traditional narrative of progression, along with texts on each of the artists and extensive images of the work. What it offers is not a single argument, but a framework for thinking about painting as something unbound by sequence—where references coexist rather than follow.
I had the opportunity to be in conversation in the galleries with one of the artists included in the exhibition, an experience that stays with me. Sitting together in front of the work, speaking in real time, reinforced something the catalogue holds more quietly: that painting is not fixed. It is in dialogue—with history, with the present, and with each of us as we encounter it.
This catalogue is in my library because it gives language to a shift I continue to see. Not a break from the past, but a different way of holding it.
All at once.
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