“Dear Painter, Paint Me …” shows how today’s realistic painting presents itself: provocative, critical, ironic, and emotive. Since the early 20th century, the advocates of an abstract, conceptual modernity have contested the validity of realistic modes of representation as politically and aesthetically reactionary. Yet, there have always been artists defying this maxim. The exhibition opens with the erotically charged nudes Francis Picabia painted after pictures in newspapers in the 1940s. “Dear Painter, Paint Me …” presents 17 international artists who, working in his wake, have ventured to explore the “figurative” from a mostly conceptual, media-filtered point of view. The loose genealogy of post-war realistic painting spans from Bernard Buffet, Alex Katz, Sigmar Polke, and Martin Kippenberger to the present New York scene and artists like John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Kurt Kauper, as well as works by such artists as Luc Tuymans or Neo Rauch.

In cooperation with Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Kunsthalle Wien.