Curated by Dennis Szakacs

For more than forty years, Richard Jackson has taken the piss out of painting, only to shoot it back with such manic energy and monumental ingenuity as to jolt the medium into sublime toxic shock. Reactivating action painting on his own demanding and unruly terms, Jackson only ever uses the canvas as a starting point for towering architectures and baffling feats of labor. More than sixty-five of the LA master’s works made between 1969 and the present will comprise “Ain’t Painting a Pain,” including drawings, large-scale environments, elaborate painting “machines,” and new site-specific installations. In conjunction with a catalogue featuring essays by Szakacs, Michael Darling, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Van Cauteren, Jeffrey Weiss, and John C. Welchman, this retrospective promises to fill a gaping, Jackson-size hole in the history of painting as a radical conceptual practice.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer