"Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre"
2001-11-19 until 2002-01-06
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
Milwaukee, WI, USA United States of America

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum presents Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre. Evoking pre-Renaissance European art, the exhibition is a visual feast of Medieval-style figures populating jewel-toned oils while presenting moral issues such as temperance, prudence, faith, fortitude, and justice.

The public is invited to the Remarks and Gallery Talk, a brief lecture by Nathan Guequierre followed by a gallery tour with the artist, on Wednesday, November 28 at 7 p.m. Nathan Guequierre, the artist‚s husband and an internationally published author, is art critic for the Shepherd Express and contributor to the New Art Examiner. The gallery will be open at 6:30 p.m. Remarks and Gallery Talk admission is $5 General, $3 Students with ID and Members.

Organized by James DeYoung, head conservator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Virtues, Vices, Vanities features two dozen oil paintings from several series of work: Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Cardinal Virtues, Games, Nature Girls, and Things I Mistook for Love. Often humorous, Guequierre's paintings present people embodying universal roles, the metaphors used to understand life. There is a brief moment in each child's life where stories heard meld with the observed adult world. For that brief moment, there is a balance between innocence and wisdom, said guest curator James DeYoung, The paintings of Jean Roberts Guequierre, with their child-like clarity, capture that balance.

Inspired by the Flemish Primitives, Giotto, and illuminations from the medieval Book of Hours, Jean Roberts Guequierre explores games, sins and virtues. In some ways, I am trying to recapture technical and compositional elements of this art gestures, flatness, translucency, mutable settings, a narrative voice simultaneously intimate and removed said Guequierre, My narratives tend to be more ambiguous, however, than those of old paintings, largely because I don't work with a codified system of symbols.

Guequierre uses painting techniques similar to old masters Van Eyck and VanderWeyden, building multiple layers of translucent oil washes on canvas and board primed with colored grounds. Light pores through the glazes and is reflected off the primer, creating luminous images. The engaged figures--often borrowed directly or tacitly from earlier paintings--enact narratives unbounded by neither time nor place. A display devoted to her oil painting process shows artworks in various stages, from preliminary sketches to under painting and glazing.

A skilled draftsperson educated at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Guequierre has received several prestigious awards including two Milwaukee County Emerging Artist fellowships. She has exhibited in the Midwest, including solo exhibitions at the Madison Wisconsin Academy Gallery, the Hermetic Gallery and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee and group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum and John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Wisconsin

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