ABSTRACT
Well-known for his postmodern Transavanguardia (Trans-avantgarde), a term coined in 1979, Achille Bonito Oliva became an art critic around 1968, after debuting as a poet. His curatorial practice in the 1970s was innovative, introducing major exhibitions like Contemporanea (Rome, 1973-1974). In the 1980s he was strongly committed to the “return to Painting.” “The Accomplished Nihilist” is a perfect example of the manipulation of American art history for locally-focused purposes. In the past two decades American art in New York has concerned itself with impersonality and a conceptual reflection on the means of artistic production. The young American artists obviously felt the influence of other earlier expressive outcomes and their changing economic and social context, which made the technological fetish much less present in their work. “Pattern painting” includes artists whose own pictorial motives are taken from local cultures, a play on the manual repetition of abstract visual elements and the manipulation of materials taken from craft techniques.
