The oldest aesthetic opposition in modern and contemporary art, representation versus abstraction, also engages many of the artists in the exhibition. Tauba Auerbach’s Fold paintings, for example, are simultaneously and seamlessly both representational and abstract. Abstraction and reality blend in Urs Fischer’s “dust paintings.” Kelley Walker’s bricks read as both an abstract pattern and an impenetrable wall. Walker’s “brick paintings” propose another way to reconcile the opposing aesthetic directions of Pollock, Johns, and Warhol. They reference Pollock’s nonhierarchical composition, Johns’s engagement with the found abstraction of his flagstone pattern, and Warhol’s abstraction of iconic images rendered with a mechanical printing technique.

Wade Guyton uses the ink-jet printer as his painting factory. The artist’s gesture is mediated through the digital file and the printing machine. Even though it is a machine rather than the artist’s hand that makes the marks, the paintings present a strong gestural quality. They are a digital response to the black brushstrokes of Franz Kline and the “Black Paintings” of Stella. Seth Price’s work fuses digital information with plastic manufacturing techniques. Mental images are packaged in vacuum-formed, high-impact polystyrene.

While Warhol’s Factory actually farmed out the production of photo silk screens, Urs Fischer’s studio is equipped with machines to not only make silk screens but wash them as well. He embraces whatever technologies he needs to realize his ambitious vision. Fischer’s “dust paintings” build on the concepts, imagery, and techniques of a succession of radical artistic innovations from Man Ray’s 1920 photograph  Dust Breeding to Warhol’s silk-screened abstractions to the dust in Bruce Nauman’s 2002 videos Mapping the Studio. The structure of the work also references the metal surfaces of Christopher Wool’s paintings. The work fuses a strain of radical art history into a contemporary abstract vision.

Unlike the other artists in “The Painting Factory,” Josh Smith emphasizes his use of traditional painting techniques, even using small canvases as palettes. His approach is anything but traditional, however, as he creates multiple versions of a limited number of motifs and sizes with intensive energy. Curator Massimiliano Gioni describes Smith as a “factory of one.” He does by hand and with endless variations what Warhol would have done with a mechanical process. Smith shows that the painting factory is a state of mind more than a physical reality.

Sterling Ruby makes industrial-strength paintings, bringing to the medium the super-scaled ambition that Richard Serra brings to sculpture. Ruby works in a factory-like studio in an industrial area of Los Angeles. The sublime refinement of Mark Rothko is crossed with the anarchic gestures of spray-can graffiti.

Julie Mehretu brings military mapping, architectural drawing, and urban planning into the composition of her paintings. Her work encompasses both the history of modern abstract painting and the history of the modern world. Glenn Ligon sets up a dialogue between painting and literature, abstracting texts by James Baldwin and other writers. The “literary” references that were dismissed by Clement Greenberg as undermining the integrity of abstract painting are central to the form and content of Ligon’s work. Ligon’s “Figure” series, which is featured in the exhibition, is a fascinating response to Warhol’s “Shadows,” infusing the shadow with additional meaning.

Mathematics and linguistics inform the work of Tauba Auerbach, whose paintings are instilled with conceptual rigor and philosophical challenge. She has been able to update the type of conceptual structures in the work of an earlier generation of artists like Sol LeWitt to the digital age. Her work has the precision of machine fabrication but is laboriously made by hand, sometimes using industrial equipment like paint sprayers. Her work extends the tradition of modern abstract painting into a contemporary context, both conceptually and formally.

Kerstin Brätsch’s paintings put notions of artistic genius and authenticity to the test, whereas the multiplication of Adele Röder’s digital design questions the limits of the pliability of visual data. In 2007, they formed the collective DAS INSTITUT, an “import-export agency” designed to counteract the commercialization of their works and artistic personae by making imagery circulate between design (pattern), announcement, and reproduction (distribution). Painting is extended into printed fabrics, posters, knitting patterns, and various services such as food campaigns and exhibition displays.

Mark Bradford makes extraordinary paintings without painting. The physical presence of his work references Pollock, Johns, and Warhol, but the works are not painted in the conventional sense. They are built up with layers of paper and then incised and sanded down. Embedded in the layers of paper are sections of billboards and advertising posters directed to the residents of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. The work makes both a compelling social statement and a stirring formal response to the history of abstract painting. He has found a contemporary solution to one of the most challenging problems in painting: how to express a social message in an abstract form.

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock was the title of Kirk Varnedoe’s brilliant Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in 2003. The title was ironic, derived from a “dyspeptic” viewer’s comment on the painting of J. M. W. Turner recorded in an essay by nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt. One of Varnedoe’s goals in his six lectures was to show how abstract art after Pollock was in fact infused with meaning. Much of the meaning of the work was about its own history and materiality. It reflected the social context of its time, but that was less important than the work’s engagement with formal and perceptual issues.

Painters of Modern Life, an adaptation of the title of Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 essay on Constantin Guys, might be a better description of the younger group of abstract painters who are the subject of this exhibition. No longer “pictures of nothing,” even in an ironic sense, the works of these artists address today’s social and cultural issues in addition to continuing a dialogue with the dynamic history of abstraction. Abstract painting, which for a time was almost left for dead, has reemerged as one of the art forms most engaged with contemporary life.