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A Perfect Romance
Part III - Online Exhibition -
Press Release
For our third and final online exhibition to close the summer season David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present “A Perfect Romance: Scenes of Desire and Intimacy in Times of Chaos,” an exhibition that gathers works by a varied group of artists spanning nearly 100 years centered around themes of desire and intimacy. For most of the artists included, erotic representations are an inherent part of their practice, if not an explicit focus.
The figures and scenes presented display a wide range of interests and motifs, from intimate nude sketches and obsessive, voyeuristic indulgences, to melancholy and analytical works on a more human scale. Clothing often plays a significant role in many of these scenes. Fabric conceals and reveals the body; useful for its ways of regulating or controlling desire in others, or keeping censors at bay. The theatricality of dressing likewise allows one to easily objectify, commodity, or fetishize the body; with the duality of power and the gaze inevitably entwined in depictions of sexuality and desire.
“All art is erotic,” Adolf Loos wrote in his infamous “Ornament and Crime” essay of 1908, where he further emphasized the erotic and “gendered” impulse of vertical and horizontal lines in drawings, even as it relates to more abstract works. Ultimately, the effects of erotica comes down to the projection of the viewer. Each generation that depicts erotica must transcend its own taboos, as in the case of George Grosz, for whom erotica provided a respite from the brutality around him, even when the misery of his models matched the often gruesome style in which he depicted them: “Even when my images represent the most vile debaucheries they are always expressions of concrete moral tendencies.”
This online exhibition features artworks by Richard Artschwager, Hans Breder, William Copley, Carroll Dunham, George Grosz, Alice Maher, Jonathan Meese, Wardell Milan, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, Serban Savu, Miroslav Tichy, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Jorinde Voigt.
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Photograph by Mike De Dulmen.
William Copley
William Copley (1919-1996, b. New York, NY) A once marginalized figure in the art world, Copley has since the 1990’s been recognized as a master provocateur and indispensable figurative painter whose irreverent output defied critics and censors alike with sexually provocative scenes that fused the intimate with the pop-cultural. Included here are works on paper from his now-celebrated “X-Rated” series of the early-to-mid-1970’s, highlighting joyfully explicit imagery derived from porn magazines found in Times Square shops that contort and distort bodies often to the point of abstraction.
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George Grosz
George Grosz (1893-1959, b. Berlin, Germany) One of Germany’s most significant artists of the 20th century, Grosz consistently explored the antagonisms of artistic and political life, first in the Weimar Republic and then in the United States, where he moved in 1932. Grosz was torn between a partisan, rationalist attitude and a passionate, reckless craving for the feverish pleasures of the 1920s, between basic Communist convictions and a longing for the USA. Under the influence of these new, positive impressions, and because he had lost his faith in the strength of the masses, he turned away from political propaganda and affectionately caricatured New York characters and while continuing to depicting nudes and landscapes in his newfound home.
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Jonathan Meese
Jonathan Meese (b. 1970, Tokyo, Japan) For Meese, his interest in the erotic is just one aspect of an all-encompassingpractice, lying somewhere between expressionism and actionism, combining painting, sculpture, installations and performance. His personal mythology is a blend of historical, pop culture, and science fiction references, evoking political and cultural figures like, all of whom represent differ- ent facets of the artist’s identity, and all of which the artist seeks to adopt and empty them of meaning. His work espouses the ‘dictatorship of art’.
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Wardell Milan
Wardell Milan (b. 1977, Knoxville, TN) Milan’s practice is conceptually grounded in photography; often using photographs - either personal or historical - as initial inspiration behind the composition of drawings and collages. Often referencing a wide range of historical artists (Mapplethorpe, Arbus, etc.), Milan appropriates the images and thus the bodies depicted into a vision uniquely his own, often implicating the viewer in their complicit voyeurism and spectatorship of black bodies in particular. The photographs included in this presentation are some of his most personal works to date.
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All Artworks
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