Claudia DeMonte "The Luxury of Exercise"

June Kelly Gallery

poster for Claudia DeMonte "The Luxury of Exercise"

This event has ended.

The Luxury of Exercise, an exhibition in which Claudia DeMonte continues to express her singular vision of a woman’s role in the world with her Female Fetish sculptures and drawings and an installation of dozens of small bronze exercising women, will open at the June Kelly Gallery on September 10. The works will remain on view through October 6.

In a new monograph entitled Claudia DeMonte, Agnes Gund, president emerita of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, writes in a foreword that she marvels “at how tenaciously and passionately DeMonte has explored the relationship of images and women.”

“For more than thirty years,” Gund wrote, “she has addressed her chosen themes again and again, employing numerous strategies within a wide array of media. One senses a vibrant, concerned, empathetic soul in them all.”

In the monograph, just published by Pomegranate, art writer Eleanor Heartney says in an essay on DeMonte that the artist’s travels “had made her increasingly aware of the way that objects act as surrogates for important issues in our lives.”

Thus, in this exhibition, DeMonte’s Female Fetish objects include exercise weights, a running shoe and a Yoga figure sculpted from wood and covered with pewter pictographic configurations that are reminiscent of the Milagros in Mexican folk art.

Heartney writes that DeMonte’s small bronzes are “leavened with an awareness of aging” and “depict a pony-tailed woman in various exercises and yoga postures gamely doing her best to preserve her health and agility.”

The pieces manifest an energy that is abstract, powerful and celebratory while being intensely engaged with self, culture, and humanity. Heartney says that “the most memorable aspect of DeMonte’s work is its wit.”

“Feminist and funny, her paintings, sculptures, prints and installations demonstrate that challenges to the patriarchy, redefinitions of the canon and the dethroning of high art don’t have to be ponderous matters,” Heartney writes. “ Her work proves that charm and insouciance can go a long way in the battle to get people to think.”

DeMonte lives and works in New York City and Kent, Connecticut. She received a bachelor's degree from College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore and an MFA from Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.


[Image: Claudia DeMonte "Female Fetish: Yoga Figure" (2009) Pewter and brass on wood 19 x 15 x 17 in.]

Media

Schedule

from September 10, 2009 to October 06, 2009

Artist(s)

Claudia DeMonte

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