"For the most part everything in 50 Paintings adheres to painting’s traditional format and processes, with the exception for Peter Halley’s shaped canvas, Torkwase Dyson’s relief painting, and Jacqueline Humphries’s use of stenciling. As such much of the work in 50 Paintings reaches back and reflects the revisionism of the 1980s that accompanied the end of modernism’s various prohibitions. All that is missing is a strong dose of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo. Beyond those movements and the popularity of appropriation—painting became pluralistic—neither abstract, abstraction, nor the mimetic were privileged. It’s good to note that among the name artists who are in this exhibition such as Mary Heilmann, Cecily Brown, Judy Ledgerwood, April Gornik, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Pat Steir, many are of that generation of the 1970s and ’80s who grappled with the so-called postmodern crisis in painting. Subsequently, their works here have more to do with their pictorial sensibility rather than formal or material inventiveness. Ultimately, apart from Matt Connors’s somewhat trompe l'oeil painting that looks as if it might be a collage, the works gathered for this exhibit focus more on the trace of the presence of the artists than that of the self-reflective viewer." 

- Saul Ostrow