Yesterday we checked out the “About Face” portrait exhibit at the Blanton Museum. Another great exhibit! For exhibits like this that are (more or less) chronological, we try to start our viewing at the end, or the latest works and work our way backward in time. I usually enjoy viewing contemporary works the most, as I haven’t seen as many of them, and they are more relevant to my own work.
I absolutely love all works by Chuck Close. He’s one of the painters that I contemplate often when I am about to start a painting session. I love how his portraits are made up of tiny abstract shapes, and how interesting all those shapes are, and how much fun it is to see a progression of the various shapes within the portrait—more fun when the work is in color, but almost more interesting in black and white. I keep wondering how I could incorporate shapes like his into my abstract paintings. (Does it even make sense? Maybe I should paint little representational shapes that make up a larger abstract work.)
I was thrilled to see the work “Synecdoche” by Byron Kim, which consists of oil and wax on twenty panels, and are portraits in the sense that each panel is the base skin color of each of twenty models that he found on the UT campus; thus the title, “Synecdoche” (a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole). These twenty panels are in a way part of a larger work, or kind of a synecdoche within a synecdoche, the larger work now owned by the National Gallery of Art. The larger work has been shown at such museums as the Tate and MOMA, which has a link to a nice video explanation by Byron Kim.
<– This sculpture made up of photographs by Oliver Herring amazes me. Kind of like David Hockney in 3D. 🙂
The oil painting by Jim Torok below is only about 4″ x 3″ — awesomely done and really requires close viewing! I’m trying to imagine the numbers of hairs in the brushes he must have used.
The portrait by Robert Henri is a long-time favorite of mine; I can stare for hours at almost any of his paintings, and his portraits are particularly amazing.
It is also great to see again the “Portrait of George Gershwin in a Concert Hall” by David Alfaro Siqueiros, which is also a portrait of dozens of audience members.
So much great work, so little time to talk about it, so go to the Blanton and see this show yourselves, if you can. It’s up through September 4th. There are rooms and rooms of paintings from present-day back to the 14th century. I took photos of many of the ones that I found compelling, which you can see in the gallery below.
Cheryl Sorg, in a piece titled “Bodies I Have in Mind, and How They Can Change to Assume New Shapes,” created a piece that encompassed I think all of the text of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, each line of tiny text cut out and arranged in concentric shapes morphing from a circle of text to a butterfly, each shaped piece about 24” in diameter and encased between sheets of plastic. Another notable piece was called “Scroll and Palimpsest” by Bob Simpson – a 13 panel long mixed media piece on plywood that beautifully incorporated marks that resembled writings with drawing and painting.
So we made a new plan to go to the MOCA downtown. As it happened, they were installing a new show, so they only had a couple of rooms of art to view. The sculpture above, made of crashed airplane parts (if I remember right), and the figure on the right (with live birds) were in the courtyard outside the museum.