NYAB Event - Patricia Cronin "Dante: The Way of all Flesh"

Patricia Cronin "Dante: The Way of all Flesh"

fordPROJECT

This event has ended.

Patricia Cronin "Dante: The Way Of All Flesh," is a meditation on the human condition, using Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as a point of departure. Comprised of oil paintings and watercolors, Cronin continues Dante’s exploration of justice and revenge using her own expressive language. This new cycle of figurative works are representative of the artist’s response to our current global circumstances. By focusing on the human form, Cronin reinforces the concept of our shared humanity, albeit from the perspective of a disillusioned present.

The painterly figures that Cronin creates take their visual cues from over seven centuries of artistic interpretations including 14th century illuminated, Italian fashion magazines, tracings of the artist’s own body and an archive of personal photographs taken throughout Italy. With a deft understanding of her materials, Cronin allows the figures to take shape in natural states and creates surfaces with both bold and meticulous strokes. With an intense palette of reds, oranges, cool blues and purples, the artist depicts the dead and the hell of their own design. Over the past two decades Cronin has developed a series of unique feminist interventions by injecting contemporary political content into a variety of historic materials, forms and styles. As Charles M. Lovell writes in the Newcomb Art Gallery’s catalogue, Patricia Cronin: All is Not Lost, “Her groundbreaking oeuvre, exploring notions of gender as well as gay and lesbian representation, employs classical idioms ably realized in traditional media.”

[Image: Patricia Cronin "Untitled" (2012) oil on linen 46 x 64 in.]