There is a great pleasure in a museum room where paint still reads as paint. The ICONIC exhibition at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art is that kind of room.
Curated by Didi Menendez and David Hummer, the show keeps faith with traditional paint and a hand-held brush at a time when so much of what we see is on a screen. The premise is direct: in a culture full of digital images, the line between an original painting and what an algorithm can produce has become easier to blur. ICONIC makes space for work that asks us to slow down, move closer, and take in the complexity of a surface conceived by a human and built by hand.
From what I have seen online, the exhibition also reads as a conversation about recognition. Cultural and historical figures appear in different ways, which adds another layer. It is an opportunity to consider what we already know from pictures, and what happens when another enters the conversation with pigment, brush, and scale.
My contribution (see image above) is built through Structural Omission, a framework that structures painting around the limits of observation, perception, and knowing. The known and the unknowable exist together in the painting. The work provokes without pretending the full story exists.
I will not be able to get to Wisconsin for this exhibition, so my perspective is through a screen too. That is more than a little ironic, given what the exhibition is about. It is also a reminder of why museums matter. A painting can travel as an image, but it still makes its strongest impact in person.
If Wisconsin is within reach, the show is on view now through June 13, with an closing reception on June 12.
ICONIC
Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art (WMOCA)
March 5 – June 13, 2026
Closing reception: June 12
Curated by Didi Menendez and David Hummer
Visit Artsy to discover more about the work in the exhibition.
Deborah Scott is a contemporary painter and originator of Structural Omission, a theory of representation developed in practice. Her work repositions realism within contemporary art, exposing the incompleteness of perception and dismantling the illusion of narrative closure. Exhibited in museums across the U.S. and Europe, her paintings investigate the limits of observation to examine what can be seen and what remains beyond reach.
Her writing connects Structural Omission to contemporary realism, art theory, post-certainty philosophy, and the problem of human-made representation in the age of AI. Her essays circulate across academic and public platforms, and she has been profiled by art historian John Seed.
Explore the Structural Omission framework →
Learn more about painting in the Post-Certainty Era →
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