Ruth Weisberg: Love, Sacred and Profane
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles
March 7 - April 30, 2003
Love, Sacred and Profane serves as the subject and title of an exhibition of paintings, drawings and monotypes by Los Angeles-based artist RUTH WEISBERG at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts.
In this exhibition entitled Ruth Weisberg: Love, Sacred and Profane, the artist extends her explorations to the convergence of art history and personal or collective history through layered images which express both time and memory. The exhibition derives its title from Titian’s 16th century masterpiece, Amor Sacro e Profano.
In the centerpiece of the exhibition, Ruth Weisberg echoes Titian’s painting, but disrupts its Italian landscape by inserting a large scale modern-day couple passionately embraced in dance. Ruth Weisberg says that in creating these dancers “...I also became fascinated with the history of the Tango, which like Jazz arose out of a culture of exile. Tango is the embodiment for us of attraction and passionate engagement... Overall I hope for a collision of worlds; an encounter between a Renaissance paradise and dancers in the modern world in which a core of mystery and longing persists.”
The exhibition also includes several drawings from Canto V: A Whirlwind of Lovers, a series of works especially created for The Huntington Library’s recent exhibition, in which Ruth Weisberg was the first contemporary painter ever to be commissioned for a solo exhibition at that institution. Invited to create an exhibition inspired by a work in the Huntington’s collection, Ruth Weisberg selected William Blake’s engravings for Dante’s Inferno, in which condemned lovers are endlessly buffeted in a whirlwind; close but never able to touch.
Ruth Weisberg’s work has been exhibited and represented in national as well as international museum collections such as The Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, DC; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Instituto Nationale per la Grafica, Rome, Italy. Ruth Weisberg is currently Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.
JACK RUTBERG FINE ARTS
357 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036
