LINCOLN, MASS.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announced the opening of PAINT THINGS: beyond the stretcher on view January 27 through April 21, 2013. Building on the premise that the painting itself is a structural object, upon which color is pushed around through a series of performed actions, the exhibition and its related programs examine the twenty-year development of painting-as-sculpture and vice versa, and feature 18 contemporary artists who use sculptural and performative mediums as a means of confronting or questioning the practice of painting.

PAINT THINGS is organized by deCordova curator Dina Deitsch and guest curator Evan Garza, Exhibitions and Public Programs Coordinator, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), co-founder and assistant director of the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), and former Editor-at-Large for New American Paintings. Featured artists include Claire Ashley, Katie Bell, Sarah Braman, Sarah Cain, Alex Da Corte, Cheryl Donegan, Franklin Evans, Kate Gilmore, Alex Hubbard, James Hyde, Sean Kennedy, Wilson Lawrence, Steve Locke, Analia Saban, Allison Schulnik, Jessica Stockholder, Mika Tajima, and Summer Wheat.

PAINT THINGS artists have expanded painting beyond the two-dimensional picture plane and into sculptural forms through spatial and material investigations. This colorful, genre-busting exhibition invites us to re-examine the practice of painting and consider the limitless possibilities for the future of the medium and its material context. The artists serve up bold, gestural, and highly innovative works that invite us to think about painting as it relates to physical, social, and emotional space. PAINT THINGS brings together painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and video works that explore the intersections of these disciplines through form, color, and space.

Painting has long been associated with the traditions of art making, and—like the stretcher itself—has been historically confined. In shifting, merging, and applying the conventions of painting to the multi-dimensional possibilities of sculpture, the artists featured in PAINT THINGS subsequently address broader notions of art, practice, and form. Beginning with major contributions to this dialogue from female artists in the early 1990s, this group exhibition underscores a decades-long fusing of the disciplines of painting and sculpture that brings with it a subtext of feminism, body politics, and performance.

Over the past five years, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum has renewed its focus on sculpture and related media, with an interest in the increasingly blurred boundaries of sculpture, installation, painting, and performance. Contemporary artists are similarly investigating the material dimensions of paint and painting traditions and PAINT THINGS visualizes the exciting convergence of these two moments.