Thomas Lawson (artist)

[25] Lawson next moved to New York and enrolled in the Art History and Criticism PhD program at CUNY Graduate Center, where he studied with Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Robert Pincus-Witten, and alongside postmodern writers Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens.

[4][47][9] Lawson's own early work was situated at the crux of photography and painting, and combined deadpan, crudely modeled media archetypes (representing family, passion, violence and national iconography), which he isolated on modern, painterly fields of gestural marks or monochromatic grounds.

[51][52] Decontextualizing overused painting techniques and snapshots drawn from tabloid stories, he sought to reconstitute and question their lost meaning and to expose the hollowness and insensitivity of conditioned responses to spectacle and tragedy.

[40][59][56] In 1983, Lawson began using photographic images of classical architecture and mountain landscapes that connoted institutionalized culture, power and mysticism, which he obscured with veils of painterly, scumbled brushstrokes (and later, dots, pills and paisleys).

"[66][67][68][69][60] Eleanor Heartney, however, considered the architectural images less resistant to the seductions of the painting surfaces than earlier romantic imagery, as did Donald Kuspit, who felt the critique was vulnerable to absorption by the dominant culture.

"[49] Lawson deemed the move essential to avoiding the co-optation that rendered political art in galleries "nothing more than the ineffectual bleating of an elite whose job it is to show the human face of entrenched power.

[6][77][78] For the five-year commission, A Portrait of New York (1989), he covered a one-third mile length of scaffolding parapet during renovation of the city's Municipal Building with bright blue and orange, casually rendered imagery drawn from local civic statuary, redressing the short shrift given women and minorities in public sculpture by shuffling their images with those of monumentalized historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Nathan Hale and Al Smith.

[82][17][83] Some of Lawson's other public art-related projects include billboards in New Haven, Connecticut (1988) and Bellgrove Station, Glasgow (1990),[84][16] and Fallen Angels (1991), an installation based on local statuary imagery and created for the socially committed Circulo de Bellas Artes show, "El Sueño Imperative," in Madrid.

[3][90][91] These later bodies of work are characterized by a greater use of juxtaposition, fragmentation and humor, and incorporate disparate painterly techniques, pictorial conventions and imagery in a sometimes dizzying mix[11][38] that critics have described, variously, as ranging from "calm, collected and sinister"[92] to "visually disabling.

"[93] In his 1995 show, "Viennese Paintings," Lawson explored madness by juxtaposing stark, claustrophobic institutional rooms, disquieting images drawn from building facades, fountains and asylums in Vienna, and references to Freud and early modernism on diptychs rendered at topsy-turvy angles in brilliant colors.

[94][11][95] His LAXART show, "History/Painting" (2007), probed geopolitical, environmental and economic instability through images of non-Western world maps and views of the globe, political leaders (e.g., Dogs of War, 2006)[96] and victims of beheadings from news and art history, painted with discordant colors and expressive techniques suggesting Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde or George Grosz.

[97][88] In shows between 2009 and 2015, works such as Confrontation: Three Graces (2010) edged closer to painting's decorative potential and investigated the allegorical possibilities of the human figure, questions of desire and attraction, and the pictorial rhetoric of self-representation.

[90][91][98] Artforum’s Travis Diehl described similar works, such as Theoretical Picture or Voluptuous Panic (both 2012),[99] as crossbreeding and suturing "huge chunks of culture" through jarring juxtapositions of painterly techniques, and "a weirdly savaged classicism" of truncated and silhouetted fragments from myths, statuary and contemporary media.

"[93][98] Lawson gained recognition for his early writing as "a master of the terse epigram"[102] and a relentless, acerbic critic of the dominant authorities of the era;[6] in 2001, Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky described it as "unusually vivid" frontline reporting.

[40] In addition to Lawson and Morgan, REALLIFE contributors included Eric Bogosian, Jennifer Bolande, Barbara Kruger, Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Kim Gordon, Craig Owens, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Laurie Simmons, and Lawrence Weiner, among many.

East of Borneo focuses on contemporary art and its history as considered from Los Angeles and publishes essays and interviews alongside a multimedia archive of images, videos, texts, and sounds.

[119][118][122] Thus, despite CalArts’ reputation as a place where painting had to justify itself, art writers note that Lawson mentored a generation of painters there including Ingrid Calame, Laura Owens, and Monique Prieto.