CONTEMPORARY GRAPHIC ARTS HOSTED AT VANDERBILT

Written by Mathew Ogara Monday, 24 January 2011 22:26

 

NASHVILLE, TN - The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition More Than One: New Contemporary Prints and Multiples from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Collection. This exhibition opens to the public Thursday, October 4, 2007. An opening reception, held in conjunction with Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities symposium Between Word and Image, will be held Thursday, October 25 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Fine Arts Gallery. The show will be on view through December 7, 2007.

In recent years, the Fine Arts Gallery has been building a collection of contemporary prints and multiples. More Than One: New Contemporary Prints and Multiples from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Collection will offer the first opportunity to view many of these works since the gallery acquired them. This exhibition is presented as a collaboration with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 2006-2007 fellows and their two-day symposium Between Word and Image (October 25–26, 2007). More Than One will also incorporate a selection of historical prints from the collection. In an effort to explore the relationship between linguistic and visual artifacts, several prints included in this exhibition will be presented with commentaries written by the participating fellows.

Artists to be featured include Ron Adams (U.S.), Christiane Baumgartner (Germany), Harmen Brethouwer (The Netherlands), Enrique Chagoya (U.S.), Michael Craig-Martin (England), Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland), Hamish Fulton (England), Fransje Killaars (The Netherlands), Michael Mazur (U.S.), Deborah Muirhead (U.S.), Martin Puryear (U.S.), Alexis Rockman (U.S.), Sigmar Polke (Germany), Kiki Smith (U.S.), Wouter van Riesen (The Netherlands), Kara Walker (U.S.), Carrie Mae Weems (U.S.), and Terry Winters (U.S).

Also featured in this exhibition will be an installation by Nashville artist Erika Johnson (U.S.) created in conversation with the 2007 fellows of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt.

Printmaking has a rich and diverse history that continues today in new and provocative ways. The British artist, Michael Craig-Martin, for example, offers an arresting homage to two iconic paintings: The first, the Italian Renaissance painter Pierro della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ, ca. mid-1450’s, and second, the French Post-Impressionist, Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, 1884. Craig-Martin’s prints, titled Deconstructing Pierro and Deconstruction Seurat, are each new interpretations, or as the artist calls them, “deconstructions,” of these seminal works of art. In the two sets of diptychs—each a variant of the other—the artist has removed the figures from the architectural or landscape setting where they reside in the original works of art.

Contemporary artists often explore social, cultural and societal issues. While some, for example, do so by using “coded” devices such as the 19^th the century practice of the silhouette employed by the American artist Kara Walker, others, such as the British artist Sue Coe, use a more direct, confrontational approach. Gregg Horrowitz, participating fellow in the Robert Penn Warren Center’s Between Word and Image seminar, observes in the label accompanying The Emancipation Approximation how “Kara Walker creates silhouette shadow-plays out of the gender and racial images that expressed and sustained the violence of African-American chattel-slavery. Because she uses an old-fashioned medium and childish stereotypes, Walker’s works have the air of being caught in a time-lag; these are images that persist longer in memory than the narratives that once gave them meaning.” Sue Coe’s art, as noted by Cara Finnegan, another fellow in the Warren Center’s seminar, “is potent political rhetoric. Described by some critics as a modern-day Goya, Coe combines an expressionist style with a point of view that has been termed confrontational, moralistic, and populist. Frequently combining image with text, Coe’s work participates in the tradition of muckraking journalism.”

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, is a leading collegiate art gallery. The permanent collection consists of more than 5,500 works, including Asian and African art; nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American paintings and sculpture; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art; medieval sculpture; early Italian Renaissance paintings; and an extensive collection of historic and contemporary works on paper. The gallery is located on the first floor of the Old Gym, also known as the Fine Arts Building, at 23rd and West End Avenues, Nashville, Tennessee. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery or call 615-322-0605. Admission is free to all events, and the public is welcome to attend. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the International Fine Print Dealers Association, New York, New York, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

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