Utah Museum of Fine Arts to show A Survey of Shauna Cook Clinger’s Artwork

Written by Randy Moyers Tuesday, 05 April 2011 01:58

Salt Lake City, Utah - Remarkable artistic skill, deep-rooted passion and personal revelation fuse to create the body of art in this new exhibition. A survey of Shauna Cook Clinger’s artwork, An Innermost Journey showcases many of the artists’ large scale paintings created over the last thirty years. The exhibition is comprised of two parts: the “outer focus” of commissioned portraits and the “inner focus” of symbolic self-portraits. Clinger’s emotionally honest imagery and powerful rendering of the human form challenge the conventional nature of portraiture, stretching the limits in order to generate dialogue and produce an innovative exhibition of creative pieces. On view 29 October through 15 February, 2009 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

A sixth generation Utahn, Clinger is one of the state’s most prominent artists. Her works have been exhibited in public institutions throughout the United States, including the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., and she has received numerous awards such as the Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Outstanding Artist Award in 2002. Clinger’s paintings can also be found in a variety of museum, public, corporate and private collections, including the New York City Public Library, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Church History and Art, State of Utah Collections, Springville Museum of Art, University of Utah, Brigham Young University-Idaho, and Utah State University.

At age seventeen Clinger received the four-year Edwin Evans Presidential Art Scholarship to the University of Utah, where she was mentored by Alvin Gittins, a classically trained English portrait artist. After graduating with honors in 1976, Clinger continued graduate work with Gittins and at Brigham Young University School of Visual Arts. After Clinger concluded her studies in 1979, her talent and reputation soon generated a five-year waiting list for her portraiture.

Shauna Cook Clinger’s works in An Innermost Journey, are multi-faceted and multi-layered pieces that exceed boundaries of content and style. Her frequent shifts between academic realism and audacious abstraction mimic the constant blending of body and spirit in her art. Unapologetic, psychological, personal and egalitarian, Clinger’s works are at once private and universal expressions.