Thick Skin

Paint Made Flesh
The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street, NW
Tue- Sat 10am-4pm (Thur 8:30pm) Sundays 11am-6pm

The body has traditionally been used as a symbol in painting, often representing spirituality, idealized beauty and power. Paint Made Flesh, an exhibit put together by the Frist Collection, which is resting at the Phillips Collection in DC for the summer, highlights a different side of humanity, the dark conflicted and anxiety plagued side. The show is comprised of works by a multitude of artists who painted between the 1950s and the present day. The show is divided by themes, time periods and locations, making it difficult to decide where Modern ends and Contemporary begins.

Lucian Freud, Naked Man, Back View, 1991–92, Oil on canvas, 72 1/4 x 54 1/8 in. (183.5 x 137.5 cm). Courtesy of the Metropolitain Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993 (1993.71).

Although the two Lucian Freud’s date from 1988-89 and 1991-92, they are still very relevant and noteworthy. Freud painted from life over long periods of time and favored friends over professional models; he wanted to portray people as they are, not as they are posed to be. Hailing from the Tate Modern, Standing by the Rags is a magnificent portrait of painter Sophie de Stempel, who worked with Freud for eight years and modeled for him frequently. She is half lying, her body resting on a giant pile of Freud’s painting rags and half standing, her feet planted solidly on the hardwood floor. The perspective leans upwards and only a glimpse of a wall helps to anchor the space. De Stempel’s head rests on her right arm, which is arced over a bulge in the pile, cradled as if there were another person lying with her. Her gesture and facial expression seem to exude a comfort and trust that only close friends can have, but she does not have complete confidence in the stability of Freud’s rags and keeps her feet firmly on the ground. The second Freud painting depicts the controversial performing artist Leigh Bowery. Bowery’s back is turned and a curtain blocks the view into the studio, revealing only the distant wall that Freud used as a palette—these compositional choices speak of a more guarded relationship.

Susan Rothenberg, Crying, 2003, Oil on canvas. 58 1/2 x 63 1/2 in / 148.6. Courtesy of Waddington Galleries. x 161.3 cm

Susan Rothenberg and Tony Bevan paint expressively and reduce narratives to articulate deep, focused feelings of stress and tension. Rothenberg’s “Crying,” an entirely red and white painting—her most frequent colors, because of their fleshy human qualities—depicts a head and neck covered by four hands that seemed to have wiped any recognizable features off the face. The face, hands and arms are red and disembodied, and they emerge from the upper left through a white background that has been layered over red. The work captures the haze and wearing nature of depression. Bevan also uses red and white but in a more restrained aesthetic. The red lines that scar and illustrate “Head” seem to be abstract and cluttered up close, but from far away describe strained, stretched, balloon-like face from a skewed upwards perspective. The face seems to float away, falling apart and coming back together on upon each viewing expressing the struggle to maintain clarity in this complicated world.

Jenny Saville, Hyphen, 1999, Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. © Jenny Saville

John Currin, The Hobo, 1999, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Jenny Saville and John Currin are both technically accomplished painters who deal with female beauty from totally different perspectives. Saville moved around a lot as a child, always having to adjust to a new location and new people. She sees herself as an outsider and is attracted to unconventional body types. Her studies with a plastic surgeon led to a discovery of the ‘object-ness’ of flesh, and its ability to be sculpted and manipulated, strangely similar to paint. She confronts and embraces her anxieties about being different with monumental paintings, often self-portraits, which have been built up with large areas of paint layered with a roller. “Hyphen” is a double portrait of the artist and her sister, who is resting her head on Saville’s shoulder. Saville’s eyes seem to dare anyone to judge her, effectively guarding herself and her sister—who stares hesitantly but hopefully into the distance—from the harsh world. By contrast, John Currin embraces the long history of objectifying the female figure in his satirical, campy and playfully hedonistic paintings. He celebrates the ridiculousness of the obsession with a perfect female form in “Nude with Raised Arms,” daring his audience to try look away and to decide whether this smooth creamy young body emerging from a milky blackness is Venus, pornography or both. Even more bluntly camp, “The Hobo” makes fun of the way that everyone, even destitute, downtrodden people, are inexplicably beautiful on bad television. Currin does not accept any guilt for his pleasures but instead dutifully recognizes and embraces the beauty and depravity that seem inexorably intertwined in his view of the world.

Daniel Richter, Duisen, 2004, Oil on canvas, Image Size: 106 1/4 x 137 3/4 inches. Courtesy of David Zwiner Gallery.

German painter, Daniel Richter is concerned with music, current events, and graffiti culture. The craze that overtakes people when they take drugs and infrared pictures inform Richter’s style and present the point of view of “the paranoid westerner,”* a group which he confrontationally and bravely confesses to be a part of. Richter turns current tragic and violent news events into ambiguous paintings that could be read as celebrations. Using neon energetic colors, he layers the complications of living comfortably as part of first world culture while being surrounded by economic, environmental and military problems, both domestic and foreign. “Duisen” is a painting of a crowd of people with upraised arms, who are melting in violent Technicolor in a black cityscape background. They look as if they could be part of a rave at a concert or victims of some as yet unknown bio-weapon. Duisen is a made-up word that is play between the German words that mean millions and south. Richter is referencing the influx of immigrants to Germany from southern countries, bringing with them political, social and economic upheaval.

Paint Made Flesh includes superlative examples by artists Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel, Richard Diebekorn and De Kooning and many others that have come from first-rate museums around the world. The Frist has brought together a phenomenal group of paintings but do not expect to find bucolic and carefree works. This is a challenging exhibit that brings together many different stressful concepts and events. If you leave feeling stressed and overwhelmed than the show did exactly what it intended to do.

-Ophra Paul

Paint Made Flesh is on view at the Phillips Collection until September 1st.

*Schatz, Matthias. “Paranoid Westerner” Daniel Richter Paints Crowds, Harlequins, Terror.” Bloomberg.com (July)

**Although I currently work at The Phillips Collection as a Museum Assistant I was not involved with the planning or implementation of Paint Made Flesh. I am not a Phillips Collection spokesperson; I take personal responsibility for this article.

Debris and Dialogue

Jean Shin, Chemical Balance III, 2009, Prescription Bottles, mirror and epoxy, fluorescent lights. Installation at Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Frederieke Taylor Gallery, N.Y. Photo by Ken Rahaim

Jean Shin: Common Threads
Smithsonian American Art Museum
8th and F Streets
11:30 am – 7pm

The consumerist society we live in attempts to define people by their material possessions. We accumulate and discard, we acquire and reject. Jean Shin is a kind of cultural anthropologist who collects these discarded consumer objects and reformulates them into large sculptures and instillations. The pieces preserve, reassess and amplify the importance of these objects to our identity and day-to-day living. Jean Shin: Common Threads, currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum displays eight works by Shin, which comment on a large scope of societal issues, all through our trash.

Chemical Balance III is a grouping of four stalactites and stalagmites of empty pill bottles that are installed at the entrance to the exhibit. Shin collected the bottles from friends, nursing homes, and family members over the course of several months. About her practice, Shin said, “the collection process gives me the opportunity to interact with industries and professionals that I may not normally have contact with… I have spoken to many individuals about their health and engaged in numerous conversations with pharmacists, doctors, nurses, the elderly and most importantly, individuals who have been dependent on medicine all their lives.”* In this project, by collecting the containers and talking to the pill bottle owners, Shin touched many lives and opened a very delicate and private subject to the world. In some way or another, most people have felt the benefits and side effects of modern medicine and the treacherous world of contemporary health care. This collection of bottles, which seem to reach toward each other, never quite touching, symbolizes not just the day to day lives of people and our personal relationships to medication but also a dialogue that Shin has started between, doctors, nurses and patients and encourages the continuation of that dialogue in the gallery.

Dialogue is an important piece of all of Shins projects but none articulate as literally as TEXTile. The Fabric Workshop and Museum commissioned Shin to create the piece. Composed of keys from broken computer keyboards, Shin’s fabric is actually embedded with the text of her email correspondence with the Project Coordinator, Abigail Lutz and the Construction Technician, Andrea Landau. Shin opens her personal correspondence to those patient enough to read the collected keys. This glimpse of Shin’s personal dialogue is obscured by the fact that many of the keys are in slightly different fonts. Shin then invites the viewers to participate by adding their own messages with the three live rows of keys at the end to the fabric. TEXTile comprises some 22,528 keys cannibalized from thousands of keyboards that were touched by thousands of different people who used the keys to write thousands of messages. It is a never-ending fabric of communication.

The other pieces in the exhibit cover controversial topics such as the social network of a minority group, the complexity of being a soldier, and the celebration of uncelebrated but important people in our lives. The visually compelling aspects of each piece make the stories and concepts embedded in them powerful and visible. The discarded objects that Shin uses unwrap complex feelings and associations to the items that we invest in and throw away, repackaging them and organizing our priorities. 

-Ophra Paul

Jean Shin: Common Threads is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until July 26th.

* Jean Shin: Accumulations, University of Albany, Janet Riker

Borders and Boundaries

Chan Chao, Melissa, December 2006. Nationality: Peruvian. C-print, 49 x 36 3/4 inches. Edition 1/4

Chan T. Chao: Six Years Eight Months
G Fine Art
1515 14th St NW Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Hours: Tue – Sat, 11 AM – 6 PM

The Burmese photographer Chan T. Chao uses his work to individualize and humanize deep social issues, specifically dealing with borders, through groups of portraits and intermittent referential site photographs. Six Years Eight Months, a collection of photographs of women in a low security Peruvian prison, is informed by Chao’s earlier projects, such as Burma—deadpan images of pro-democracy students struggling against the military regime along Burma’s borders—and Echo—photographs of nude female friends of the artist.

Six Years Eight Months expands upon Chao’s ideas regarding physical boundaries of countries, his interest in women and his exploration of emotional, sociological, and psychological borders. The project was conceived on a trip that Chao took to Lima, Peru with his friend, a videographer, who was taping the annual spring beauty contest at a low security women’s prison. As Chao became familiar with the their stories, he learned that most of the women in the jail were there for drug trafficking. Chao grew deeply interested in the diversity of the women, their compelling stories, and the effect of confining such a range of women in one prison.

The inmates’ nationalities vary from native Peruvian, to neighboring South American countries, to Dutch. These women, lured by drug dealers, carried cocaine and other illegal substances across the Peruvian border any way they could, including refilling shampoo bottles and ingesting capsules. Each woman had their own reason for agreeing to carry the drugs. Many needed the money while others, like the 20 and 21 year olds, “Sofia and Mayra” sought the thrill of the game. One Dutch woman, “Catherina,” with wrinkles betraying her age despite her nose ring and heavy makeup, is actually paid by the government to be in jail because of a legal loophole to boost the native economy. Whatever the reason for the initial imprisonment the women all have to serve the same sentence: six years and eight months.

In a low security Peruvian prison such as this one, the inmates are completely responsible for their wellbeing. The government does not provide food, clothing or services. Inmates coming from financially stable families do well in the bartering economy, while the less fortunate must trade their services as a maid or nanny in exchange for food and clothing. Because the women are not required to wear uniforms, Chao is able to expose the personality, experiences and class of each inmate in a way that would not otherwise be possible. This is especially true in the case of “Miss Minnie,” a masterwork of Chao’s. There is little known about the woman in the portrait but Chao captures her wearing an arresting expression and childlike clothing, which tell a tale of harsh experiences and lost youth. “Melissa,” a teen who gave birth in jail, is a striking example of Chao’s emotional sensitivity and technical mastery. The heavy bags under her eyes and her halter top which reveals the scratches left by the baby on her chest necessitate an understanding of the severe reality of her life even as the soft blue paint and the stars on the walls of the nursery amplify a sense of innocence and youth about her.

Six Years Eight Months, is on view at G Fine Art until May 23rd.

– Ophra Paul