Parrish Art Museum To Open

‘All The More Real’ August 12

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Parrish Art Museum To Open

‘All The More Real’ August 12

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Louise Bourgeois (American, b France 1911), “We Love You,” 2001, fabric, lead and steel, 69 by 26 by 26 inches, courtesy Cheim and Read Galleries, New York City. ©2007 Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York City.

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Evan Penny, “Back of Norb — Variation #3,” silicone, pigment, hair and aluminum, 23½ by 28½ by 5 inches.

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FOR 8/10

‘ALL THE MORE REAL’ AT PARRISH ART MUSEUM w/2 cuts

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SOUTHHAMPTON, N.Y. — On view August 12–October 14, “All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy” will explore the various strategies artists employ to seduce and/or deflect a viewer’s engagement with the physicality of the body and the object of art.

Co-curated by artists Eric Fischl and Parrish Art Museum Robert Lehman curator Merrill Falkenberg, the exhibition is composed of paintings, sculpture, photography and video, and brings together works by a diverse group of artists.

“The representation of the body has been both central to and problematic for Modernism since its nascence at the turn-of-the-century. Over the last 100 or so years, artists have found many compelling ways to eliminate the body or to reduce its importance,” Fischl said. “The recent reemergence in paintings, sculptures and photography that insist on the inescapable presence of the body’s physicality is a compelling twist in the events of recent art history. The show explores this phenomenon. The works in the exhibition are powerful, provocative, extremely well crafted and profoundly beautiful.”

Works in the exhibition are organized according to cross-referenced categories such as scale, process and material. For example, Tom Friedman’s Untitled, 1994 (a miniature self-portrait carved from aspirin), is shown in relation to Elizabeth King’s sculpture with animation, “Eidolon,” 1998–1999, a meticulously crafted automaton that is also a self portrait.

Jeff Hesser’s monumental beeswax head “Baby Face #1,” 2006, which combines the image of a baby’s face with that of an old man, is juxtaposed with Louise Bourgeois’s fabric sculpture, “We Love You,” 2001, a crudely sewn head that alludes to the trauma of troubled family relationships. Linked through the innovative use of material and a manipulation of size, these works draw the viewer into a new, and disarming, spatial relationship with an object.

Pairing animate and inanimate subjects, another grouping considers the body and its metaphors, examining one’s relationship to sexuality, flesh, death, consumption and violence, beginning with Lucien Freud’s 1966 paintings “Naked Girl,” a confrontation evocation of the effort to represent the body as a living, feeling thing as well as an object of ambivalent desire.

In Jenny Saville’s large paintings, “Reverse,” 2003, a woman’s looming, bloody face is punctuated by her gleaming white tooth. These two works are shown next to Emily Eveleth’s paintings of fleshlike doughnuts, in which red jelly spills violently out of bodylike orifices, and Joan Goldin’s untitled 2002 photograph of peeled watermelons, which, when seen out of context, resemble flayed skin.

The simultaneous revulsion and fascination with the detailed representation of the body is demonstrated in multiple works in the exhibition, especially those related to the issue of pregnancy and birth. Alice Neel’s 1968 painting “Pregnant Betty Homitzky” and Ron Mueck’s “Mother and Child,” 2001, are paired together. Also included in this grouping is Diane Arbus’s 1967 photograph, “A Child Crying, N.J.”; Jim Croak’s “Dirt Baby,” 2000, a sculpture of a baby cast in mud; and “Newborn Baby,” 1910, a haunting watercolor by Egon Schield.

Other efforts to scrutinize the body, especially one’s romantic partner, are represented in works by Ross Bleckner and Catherine Murphy. Bleckner’s paintings of cancerous cells explores the anxiety of illness with an almost scientific detachment, while Murphy paints exacting details of her partner’s body.

All the works in the exhibition are linked by the artists’ impulse to capture the ephemeral nature of life in a concrete form. In Chuck Close’s fingerprint paintings of his wife and daughters, he attempts to collapse the ineffable distance between painter and subject as his thumbprint serves as a literal inscription of his DNA. Till Freiwald paints his subjects live in the studio and then again from memory several months later.

Other pairings contrast detailed depiction with emotional inaccessibility such as portraits of the backs of subjects’ heads by Karel Funk, Catherine Opie and Evan Penny. The presumed innocence of childhood is questioned in works by Robert Gober, Tierney Gearon and Loretta Lux, while the ennui and conformity of adolescence is explored in portraits by Tim Gardner and Do Ho Suh.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 75-page full color catalog.

The museum is at 25 Job’s Lane. For information, www.parrishart.org or 631-283-2118.