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Indepth Arts News:
"Representing LA: Contemporary Representational Artists from Los Angeles"
2001-12-09 until 2001-02-11
Frye Art Museum
Seattle, WA,
USA
Representing LA explores the rich and varied
phenomena of representational painting, drawing,
print- making, and sculpture created by Southern
California artists since 1990. Guest curator Gordon
Fuglie, director of Loyola Marymount University1s
Laband Art Gallery in Los Angeles, discovered a
strong and vital thread of figurative, realist,
illusionist, fantasy, and narrative art being
produced by a large number of Los Angeles-area
artists.
Much of the work engages the viewer with
startling reconfigurations of familiar subjects and
themes. In doing so, the artists included in the
exhibition have revitalized a number of genres
long thought passé in contemporary art, such as
portraiture and narrative painting, often with an
ironic twist.
Fuglie has organized the exhibition into nine areas: the
image of the artist, imagining selfhood, expressions of
the body, new portraiture, the city, landscape, still life,
narrative strategies, and the spiritual realm. In
sensibility, the representational work in this exhibition
covers the neotraditional to the conceptual, the
heart-on-the-sleeve to the sardonic, the ambiguous to
the factual, the nitty-gritty to the beautiful.
The exhibition fills a gap in West Coast and Southern
California art history as the Wrst major survey of the
work of eighty artists in a variety of representational
styles and approaches. Among the better- known artists
in Representing LA are Peter Alexander, Llyn Foulkes,
Robert Graham, D. J. Hall, Jim Morphesis, John Nava,
John Register, Alison Saar, Jon Swihart, Ruth Weisberg,
and Robert Williams. After its Frye debut, the exhibition
will travel to the South Texas Institute of Art, Corpus
Christi, Texas, in 2001.
An extensively illustrated, full color, 76 page catalogue with
essays by guest curator Gordon Fuglie will be available in
the museum store.
IMAGE:
Christian Vincent,
Self-Projection, 1997,
oil on linen,
56 x 70 in.
Collection of James and Vizma Sarnoff.
All rights reserved.
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