Molly Warnock is a NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of Images at the University of Basel (Switzerland).
Warnock is a historian and critic of the visual arts primarily in Europe and the United States from early 20th century modernism to the present, with a particular interest in the interplay between works of art, aesthetic philosophy and critical theory. In recent years, she has also developed a research interest in modern and contemporary art and aesthetic thought in the Maghreb, with a particular focus on Morocco. She holds a PhD in intellectual history and history of art from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, US). She has taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Emory University and Johns Hopkins, and has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Clark Art Institute.
The author of the monographs Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020) and Penser la peinture: Simon Hantaï (Gallimard, 2012), she has published additional writings on diverse artists and topics in the journals Tate Papers, Artforum, Art in America, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Journal of Contemporary Painting, and nonsite.org, among others; in the edited volumes Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art, Architecture, and Design (Routledge, 2020) and James Bishop: Malerei auf Papier / Paintings on Paper (Sieveking Verlag, 2018); and in European and American exhibition catalogues, including the recent United States of Abstraction: Artistes Américains en France, 1946-1964 (Editions Snoeck, 2021) and Martin Barré (Centre Georges Pompidou and Flammarion, 2020). Warnock also edited the three inaugural volumes in the collection Transatlantique (ER Publishing), devoted to writings by and about contemporary artists Martin Barré (2020), Simon Hantaï (2020), and James Bishop (forthcoming, 2021).
As a NOMIS Fellow, Warnock will work on her current book manuscript, The Subject of Painting: James Bishop and Tel Quel. The first in-depth study of an American expatriate painter active primarily in France, this project focuses on the reception of Bishop’s work on the part of the artists and writers associated in the 1960s and 1970s with the journal Tel Quel and its satellite, Peinture, cahiers théoriques, and links his subtle abstractions to the group’s attempts to elaborate new theoretical models of subjectivity and community under modernism. Related essays have appeared in Artforum (May 2021 and January 2014), Tate Papers (December 2019), and in the volume James Bishop: Malerei auf Papier / Paintings on Paper (Sieveking Verlag, 2018).