CCA News
ArtForum: Critics' Pick: "Painting Between the Lines" at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Posted on Monday, November 7, 2011, by Allison Byers
After organizing a trilogy of exhibitions inspired by iconic American novels (“The Wizard of Oz” in 2008, “Moby Dick” in 2009, and “Huckleberry Finn” in 2010), Wattis director Jens Hoffmann has now relayed the task of investigating the relationship between literature and art to fourteen artists. For “Painting Between the Lines,” they were each commissioned to create a work based on a description of painting from a book. While the curatorial premise of “reintroducing literature as a viable subject for painting” is straightforward, it also ambitiously engages the historical discourse regarding the inseparable nature of word and image by examining the role of narrative.