“Looking at the Overlooked” Exhibition
Westbeth Gallery
This event has ended.
Curated by Peter Colquhoun, an exhibition focusing on contemporary still life painting, in a spirit of re-evaluation and revelation. The still life genre offers possibilities that no other motif can.
Looking at the Overlooked, an exhibition focusing on contemporary still life painting, borrows its title from Norman Bryson’s book by the same name, published in 1990. In Bryson’s collection of four essays, a broad swath of the history of still life is examined and interpreted as a segment of the visual arts that has always been relegated to a status of minor importance by official arbiters of taste – an attitude that persists to this very day.
It is in a spirit of reevaluation and revelation that this exhibition has been conceived. Even the most humble motif in still life can, in the hands of certain painters, hold its own next to any figure composition or landscape, any representational or non-representational artwork. Each artist in this exhibit has found a way to express him or herself in a unique and personal way through still-life. Even if they also work with landscape or the figure, the still-life genre offers these painters possibilities no other motif can. Its intimacy and sense of quiet contemplation broadens the experience of painting while informing other aspects of the painter’s work.
Far from being frozen in some traditional form, still life has evolved since the time of Zeuxis and it continues to evolve. What actually constitutes a still life is an open question.
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2016 to January 30, 2016
Artist(s)
Lennart Anderson, Robert Bunkin, Sandra Caplan, Simon Carr, Ray Ciarrocchi, Peter Colquhoun, Francis Cunningham, Gwen Fabricant, Lawrence Faden, Robert Feinland, John Goodrich, Xico Greenwald, Albert Kresch, Valerie Mendelson, Thaddeus Radell, Jean Francois Rocheman, Peter Ruta, Susan Walp, Rachel Youens