The recent history of painting gives us two conflicting theories of the brushstroke. The first comes out of Abstract Expressionism and German Expressionism, and casts the brushstroke as painting’s existential protagonist and guarantor of an authentic deep subjectivity. Here, we see celebrations of the primal urge-to-touch crystallized in graphic space, with the implication that these strokes have something to do with a pre-visual sense of tactility that is at the core of emotional life.
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