Generation Z

Underdonk is pleased to present Generation Z, a salon-style group show of 25 artists working in the expanded field of painting. These young artists, born between 1997 and 2008, are digital natives accustomed to instant information and communication. Their understanding of painting is broad, shaped by the ability to scroll through vast databases of artists and museum collections around the world. In this environment, digital images collapse time and place, flattening hierarchies between schools of thought and art movements. With this expanded context, their work juxtaposes materials and visual languages drawn from across paintings history. The 25 artists experiment with diverse materials and processes: weaving, deconstructing, sewing, stitching, scratching, filling, dripping wax, mixing glitters and dry fillers, using silicone, cutting, affixing, and working with varied substrates. Through these approaches, they explore new ways of constructing images - projections of ideas that reconsider what painting can be. Members of Generation Z often value non-hierarchical structures, social awareness, openness around mental health, and a pragmatic, do-it-yourself sensibility, alongside a degree of skepticism (and cynicism) about the future. These traits echo through the symbolic language of their works. Raised in an American culture shaped by visible violence, live-streamed global crisis, a pandemic, economic precarity, and a climate emergency, this generation has come of age without the illusion of a simpler past. This exhibition considers what painting may become, framing the medium through a new context shaped by a generation experiencing the world under a precarity not seen in recent decades. Across their practices, these artists approach visual problems through material play, the ironic use of saturated color, desaturated palettes that evoke contemplation or anxiety, the digital warping of figures and objects through software-based systems, and the flattening of space as a gesture toward the logic of the digital image. Abstraction also operates as a formal strategy, allowing viewers to participate in completing the work's symbolic meaning.