In November 1973, while living and working in New York City, James Bishop submitted an individual grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts. Asked to describe his “proposed activity,” he responded concisely: “To continue painting.” The proposition was hardly self-evident: Wasn’t painting a thing of the past? Bishop’s statement expressed his conviction that meaningful work remained to be done. 

Taking place just blocks away from the artist’s former studio on Lispenard Street, “To continue painting”: James Bishop and New York invites fresh consideration of his enduring commitment to his medium. Why continue painting amid the staggering array of new practices that distinguished the city’s increasingly pluralist art scene? How did Bishop’s evocative formal language relate to both established and emerging tendencies within that field, from abstract expressionism through postminimalism? And—most crucially—how do his singular works speak to the challenges and possibilities of painting today

The exhibition features eight paintings in oil on canvas and eleven compositions on paper from around 1960 to 1987. Among them is the landmark Hours, 1963. Painted in Paris, where Bishop had taken up residence in 1958, this germinal workreveals his close attention to developments across the Atlantic. Working on a stretched, commercially primed canvas, the artist began by painting in a broad internal frame in a saturated blue.

Then, placing the taut surface horizontally on his studio floor, he deposited brushfuls of dilute oil paint within the delimited area, tilting and rocking the wooden chassis to create washier shapes in blue and green. The new method at once nodded to and differed from Helen Frankenthaler’s use of staining since the early ’50s, while the roughly quadrilateral compositional elements echoed the painting’s framing shape—a “deductive” gesture related to the simplified pictorial structures developed in the late ’50s and early ’60s by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, among others. 

“To continue painting” takes a special interest in the reduced yet elusive abstractions on square, human-scaled formats that Bishop began making in the late ’60s. In 1966, following nine years in Europe, the artist returned to New York for the first of what would prove four solo exhibitions at the Fischbach Gallery. (For the next twenty-one years, he would divide his time between the United States and France.) Further modifying his tilting-and-rocking technique, Bishop embraced layered, near monochromatic zones of color with simple linear armatures formed through the mutual overlapping of paint from adjacent areas. Impelled in part by his encounters with American minimalism, the new paintings nonetheless retained space for “ambiguity, contradiction, paradox”—aspects of lived experience that never ceased to interest the artist, and that he especially underscored in a 1993 interview with Dieter Schwarz. The subtly variegated color fields create unstable illusions of depth, while the rectilinear scaffolds at once solicit and rebuff a distinctly bodily empathy. (Note, in particular, the single square centered on the lower edge of Untitled, 1981, as if held fast by gravity.)

Bishop’s modestly sized paintings on paper accompany these explorations on canvas, even as they allow for more idiosyncratic structures and a greater allusive range. In the final works in this show, a trio of closely related compositions from 1985-87, a mounded, seemingly weathered form appears as if through an atmospheric haze. Completed shortly after Bishop made his final painting on canvas, these poignant works continue his practice on altered terrain.