Events + Experiments

Egg tempera and casein are among the oldest paint materials in the world, dating back beyond the written word. These simple binders, made from egg and milk proteins, have been used to adorn cave walls and church altars, paint hieroglyphs and color the earliest easel paintings.They have prepared the dead for afterlife, inspired the living to commune with deities and have expressed secret rituals and desires completely lost to known history. 

Tempera, and to a lesser extent, casein, have also had a tried and true tradition of craft associated with their use. Treatises, such as Cennino Cennini’s ‘The Craftsman’s Handbook’ and Daniel V Thompson’s ‘The Practice of Tempera Painting’ extoll a technique-based process that has informed painting methods for hundreds of years. 

Milk and Eggs, a group show curated by Andrew Falkowski, is a collection of artists who are in communion with, and deviate from, these histories. Each artist uses and pushes these materials propositionally, finding their individual perspective as they navigate between the rigid demands of this material and their own restless ingenuity. They lean into expressivity, idiosyncrasy, formal and conceptual rigor, as well as alternative painting approaches. And as each artist expounds on their own relationship to this medium, the resultant images and varying surfaces are expanding the cultural inheritance of this ancient material.