Annette Messager at David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI - Map of temper, Map of tenderness

Annette Messager

Map of temper, Map of tenderness

David Winton Bell Gallery, 

Brown University, Providence

January 31 - March 15, 1998 

David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA) presents an exhibition of works by French artist ANNETTE MESSAGER, titled Map of temper, Map of tenderness.

The exhibition title was suggested by the artist and refers to a 17th-century allegorical map, the Carte de tendre (Map of Tender [Regions]), from Clélie, a romantic novel by the French writer Madeleine de Scudéry. Annette Messager likes the idea of maps, adopting their formal elements while subverting their usefulness. In 1988, she created the "Garden of Tender [Regions]," which existed as a schematic drawing and an actual garden. The work included such fanciful creatures and sites as the path of good luck, grove of indiscretions, mirage of tears, branches of forgetfulness, tortoise of longevity and hill of despair.

"Anatomy," from the current exhibition, is a map of human anatomy but certainly not one that could be followed by the medical profession. Comprised of yarn unraveled from 15 sweaters and colored pencil drawings of body organs, the installation stretches across three walls of the gallery. The yarn is draped from drawing to drawing in a weblike configuration. Annette Messager describes the yarn as roadways and the drawings as cities and offers insight into her fascination with the human body by explaining that she grew up in a "town by the sea for people who were sick." She says that because of this experience, "sickness is normal for me." She is referring to Berck-sur-Mer, which is known for its curative waters.

Three related works, which are shown for the first time at the Bell Gallery, turn to the topic of relationships, mapping one possible course of love. Presented on the floor, each piece includes two gloves, colored pencils and black ropes. The pencils protrude from the fingers of the gloves like long fingernails, while the ropes surround them, laid out in shapes that are symbolic of the titles. The work charts a dance that proceeds from "Encounter" to "Love" to "Separation." In "Encounter" the gloves meet straight on, the fingers entwined as if holding hands. They embrace in "Love," one protectively or erotically lying atop the other. In "Separation" they turn away from one another, curled up (as in pain) and unraveling.

In "Equilibrium," 35 small photographs of body parts are suspended parallel to the ceiling, above the viewer's head. Interspersed among the photographs are mirrors of the same size. As the viewer walks under the piece, images of body parts combine with images of the viewer's own body as it is reflected in the mirrors. Annette Messager likes the awkwardness of the piece, the fact that one must strain to view the work, and the somewhat macabre and grotesque combination of self and other.

Annette Messager has exhibited extensively in Europe since the mid-1970s and more recently has caught the attention of an American audience. A retrospective of her work, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, traveled to those institutions and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.

David Winton Bell Gallery

List Art Center, Brown University

64 College Street, Providence, RI 02912

www.brown.edu

Robert Colescott, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - Recent Paintings - Touring Exhibition following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

January 24 - April 5, 1998

"There's a comic-maniac edge to these paintings produced by gross exaggerations and crazy juxtapositions. It's expressive of the insane collage of relationships I'm dealing with." -Robert Colescott

Following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins a two-year United States tour at the Walker Art Center. Organized by independent curator Miriam Roberts for SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition honors Arizona-based artist ROBERT COLESCOTT, the first painter to represent the United States at the Biennale since Jasper Johns in 1988, and the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the prestigious festival.

On view in the exhibition are 20 paintings from the past decade that employ a figurative vocabulary that challenges stereotypes and engenders debate on the state of human relations in the United States. Now 72, the Arizona-based Robert Colescott continues to produce vitally significant work and is an important role model for a younger generation of artists exploring issues of racialization, identity, power, and gender. Employing a highly personal combination of narrative figuration blended with an ironic viewpoint to address the major social issues of his time, Robert Colescott has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in recent American art.

According to curator Miriam Roberts, "Like the world they depict, Colescott's polyrhythmic, improvisational paintings are full of surprises--in juxtapositions of forms and colors, in distortions of scale, in inventions and interplays of space and structure. They are filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, not only in homages to specific paintings, but to the traditional conventions of his chosen medium - history painting, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory.

"Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing, the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present. It is a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential and lost love. Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things and events are never quite what they first seem."

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins with works from 1987, a year that marked a turning point in the artist's career. Though he continued to use satire and narrative figuration, he moved beyond the controversial images of racial stereotypes for which he had become known. Colescott expanded his range and began exploring universal themes, venturing into the realm of mythological and religious allegory and sophisticated literary allusions. Writing in Arts magazine in 1988, Linda McGreevy said: "Colescott proves himself a moralist, a history painter in the deepest sense, whose webs of cultural cause and effect have come full circle to illuminate the present."

Born in Oakland, California, in 1925, ROBERT COLESCOTT studied at the University of California at Berkeley and with Fernand Léger in Paris before participating in the resurgence of figurative art on the West Coast during the 1950s. But it was his sojourn in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1960s that compelled the artist to infuse his work with a dynamic blend of color, historical reference, and style. Three thousand years of non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color, and a sense of pattern--all these elements had a profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work. Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Colescott has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing (1985).

An illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains essays by Miriam Roberts and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and a leading Colescott scholar; a poem by Peabody Award and American Book Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe; a photographic portrait by photographer and conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems; an exhibition checklist; and selected biographical information.

The exhibition is an official presentation of the U.S. Government and was organized by Miriam Roberts for the U.S. Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in association with SITE Santa Fe.

WALKER ART CENTER

Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

www.walkerart.org

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964
George Adams Gallery, New York
January 1 – 31, 1998

In 1956, Peter Saul graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and moved with his first wife to Europe. After a brief stay in London, they lived in Amsterdam (1956-1958), near Paris (1958-1962), and finally in Rome (1962 -1964) before returning to the US and settling in Mill Valley, California. It was during this period that Saul defined himself as an artist. At the outset a self-described expressionist painter of landscapes and interiors, Peter Saul soon developed the major themes that remain central to his work even today. The present exhibition consists of paintings and drawings made during his years in Europe which reflect Peter Saul's artistic development as a social critic as well as his involvement with Pop Art, a movement with which he was identified during this time.

Peter Saul was fascinated from an early age by movies and the comics, and even after art school their influence persisted. According to Peter Saul, "The years 1959 - 1961 were pretty much used in reconciling specific drawings from Mad [Magazine] with my need to resemble deKooning." The influence of popular culture - especially the comics - is evident not only in Saul's style and use of cartoon characters - Superman, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appear as early as 1960  - but also of dialogue balloons, and multi-panel compositions. Along with a cast of characters out of Disney, greed, sex and violence - tabloid subjects that continue to remain central to Peter Saul's work  - make their first appearances during this period.

Peter Saul was not interested in simply making cartoon painting, however: "The problem with cartooniness is that it smooths out too many bumps... To get those 'bumps' back is a lot of work... I summon my memory of drawings on lavatory walls. That usually does it." These early paintings and drawings employ an over-all composition and mark-making typically associated with abstract-expressionism and, at the same time, a visual vocabulary composed entirely of images from popular culture. For all their references to popular culture, Peter Saul was not in fact a "Pop" artist. While he was initially considered a member of the movement and was even included in several Pop surveys (Lucy Lippard's Pop Art of 1966, for example), he was soon dropped and only recently reinstated through his inclusion in the LA County/Whitney Museum's recent "Hand Painted Pop."

The most important distinction between Peter Saul and the artists usually identified with Pop Art is that Peter Saul was interested in the psychological. And, while his early works share similarities with artists such as Lichtenstein, Rivers or Rosenquist, it is artists such as deKooning, Beckmann and Francis Bacon who should be looked to as more important sources. Paintings such as IceBox #3 or Valda Sherman, for example, are rooted less in the Pop Art of Rivers than in social commentary of Bacon and Beckmann. According to Peter Saul, as far as Pop Art was concerned, "my painting had too much emotion." 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com