Michael Scott is a New York–based artist whose work treats painting as a viewing condition engineered through system.
Since the mid-1980s he has developed serial bodies of work—most notably the Forty Circles and later narrow vertical line paintings on aluminum—where repetition is used to generate optical instability rather than compositional development. In the circle paintings, concentric black-and-white structures create extreme perceptual effects that resist quick recognition and sustained neutrality. In the line paintings, precisely organized vertical intervals and patterned sequences intensify this condition, pushing optical impact toward difficulty.
During the 1990s Scott described his work as programmatic—calculated and systematic—before later allowing chance and process to become more visible, and then returning again to a controlled, rule-based approach that avoids subjectivity while remaining painterly. Across these shifts, the underlying structure remains consistent: repetition, serial difference, and boundary pressure used to destabilize perception.
His work demonstrates how painting can function less as an image than as a controlled perceptual interface, where structure actively produces visual experience.
