“Painting Pictures – rendering the [photo] real,”

Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Painting Pictures–rendering the [photo]real,” a group exhibition of works by Matthew Antezzo, Judie Bamber,  Peter Cain, Marilyn Minter, Mary Murphy, Richard Phillips, Paul Winstanley, and Kevin Wolff. Exploring the use of photographs as subjects for contemporary paintings, the exhibition will be on view from February 20 through March 21, 1999.  Educational events include a gallery talk by exhibition curator, Richard Torchia, scheduled for Thursday, February 25 at 12:15 PM in the art gallery, and a lecture by participating artist, Indianapolis-based painter Kevin Wolff on Thursday March 4, at 6:30 PM in the Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall. Wolff’s lecture will be followed immediately by a public reception in the Art Gallery.

“Painting Pictures” presents fourteen paintings on canvas, aluminum, wood, and paper that consciously employ photographs as their subjects in the literal, often labor-intensive manner of “photorealism” but with a range of intentions, procedures, and effects that would have been unlikely in 1970 when this term was first used to name the work of painters Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle and others. The practice of realistically transcribing photographs into paint on canvas, sometimes disparaged as a conservative derivation of pop art driven by a numbing technique, has nevertheless persisted into the 1990s. Spurred, perhaps, by the current reconsideration of seventies culture, in the past five years the word “photorealist” has been difficult to suppress as an effective term to describe the work of numerous critically acclaimed painters. 

The exhibition serves as a way to mark the current impact of photography on painting, as well as to index critical shifts in both practices over the past thirty years. Works by Peter Cain (1959-1998), Kevin Wolff (Indianapolis) and Paul Winstanley (Great Britain) demonstrate photography’s new role as a highly adaptable source of both verisimilitude and abstraction. Mary Murphy (Philadelphia) and Judie Bamber (Los Angeles), use photos as a way to make an almost tactile, visceral contact with the recent past or as a method of mitigating personal loss. In the work of New York-based artist Matthew Antezzo, the material transformation from print to paint unleashes ideological and psychological content only latent in the original photographs.  Other works in the exhibition demonstrate the lessons of 1980s appropriation art (Richard Phillips) the contemporary resurgence of figuration (Marilyn Minter), and the cultural primacy of painting despite the ubiquitous presence of photography within the mass media.

The exhibition is funded by grants from the Arcadia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Advisory Board and Friends of the Beaver College Art Gallery.  

Since 1993 Matthew Antezzo has been basing his large-scale, grisaille paintings on photographs documenting performances and installations from the late 1960s and early 1970s. He selects works such Maggie Lowe’s Explosion  (in which the artist detonated a pair of Hostess “Snoballs”) and whose existence is entirely dependent on its having been published in an art magazine (in this case, Art in America., Jan-Feb 1971,  also the title of the work).  While Antezzo’s translation of Lowe’s convention-challenging performance into an heroically scaled oil painting is not without its irony, his canvas strives to rescue an ephemeral gesture from certain cultural amnesia. Antezzo’s work can thus be read as an act of affection, if not for Lowe’s work in particular, for the epoch of radical experimentation for which it is emblematic.  

Photographs from 1960s/70s publications also provide the sources for the recent paintings of Richard Phillips. These large-scale canvases, several of which were included in 1997 Whitney Biennial, typically depict the close-cropped faces of fashion models rendered at billboard scale and in a manner that equates the sensuous reality of oil paint on linen with the artifice of cosmetic beauty. In Transfixed, the model’s head is enveloped in a shadow of deep purple pierced by a vignetted spotlight that transforms her face into a blank mask blinded by glamour. 

Phillips’ indulgence in the surface of painting as analog for the superficial allure perpetrated by the fashion industry becomes the target of works by Marilyn Minter. The two enamel paintings on aluminum eschew her signature, Ab-Ex “drips” in an effort to exploit the fetishism of what Minter recently referred to as “photo-shop realism.” Based on photos she scans into a computer, digitally alters, and then transcribes into shiny paintings on metal panels, often applying the enamel with her own fingertips, works such as Finger Toes Study expose forms of horror that can lie beneath glamour’s thin veil. In this tightly cropped collage, Minter seamlessly joins a hyper-real image of a glossy fingernail with a similarly cropped detail of a frosted toenail, suggesting that model’s hand has been monstrously deformed.

Judie Bamber employs her technical virtuosity to both ideological and personal ends. Her Untitled #1 is a life sized, tightly cropped close-up of female genitals. Scrupulously painted in oil on a piece of wood 6” x 1 3/4”  x 2”, the work has an object-like (even phallic) presence that reverses Freudian readings of “female lack.” Based on a photograph, its extended sense of time and focused looking transcend the limits of camera vision and subvert taboos in viewers male and female, gay and straight. Bamber is also represented by two 10” x 14” watercolors of meticulously rendered photographs of her father (who died as a young man while she was still a child). A sunstruck black and white beach portrait (from 1966) and a flash-filled side-view of her father typing (based on a photo taken three years later and printed after his death) stubbornly record every nuance of the faded, original prints.  Despite their fidelity to the snapshots, Bamber’s watercolors possess an elusive clumsiness that sidesteps sentimentality while subtly asserting her felt presence.

Mary Murphy has also cultivated a crafted approach to transcribing family photographs into psychologically charged paintings.  Recognized in Philadelphia for her abstract paintings of interwoven, painted bands, in recent years Murphy has applied her fascination with the grid as image to the grid as an instrument of depiction. Mom, Dad, Maureen and Me translates a detail of a group portrait into a mosaic of 1200 one inch square gray tones, each loosely brushed and smudged into the next. The resulting distortion of detail accentuates facial features and anomalies, while alluding to the struggle of preserving identity within the often unspoken and repressive structures of family dynamics. 

Indianapolis based artist Kevin Wolff is represented by two canvases that relate directly to his series of paintings of reflections exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.  In Wall, False Hole, Mirror, Wolff depicts a photograph he took of a circle of black paper affixed to a mirror (unfocused) and a found photograph of an interior (beyond the mirror) into which a real hole has been cut. Mourning Picture represents a clipping (from a Spanish rock magazine) of two young men attached to a mirror tilted at an angle beyond which an inverted bouquet of roses hangs. One of the men, flattened and distorted by foreshortening, directs his eyes at the other, whose head has been cut out in a flower-shaped flap that hinges forward, parallel to the picture plane, his face and the scalloped edges that frame it sharply in focus. Both paintings’ play of gazes, reflections, and multiple methods of representing space suggest the baroque reflexivity of Valesquez’ Las Meninas, a work critic Hal Foster has suggested as a paradigm of photorealist practice.

Engaging cerebral puzzles are also posed by a pair of Los Angeles streetscapes by Peter Cain. Mobil and Glendale Boulevard might suggest the obsessive chaos of Richard Estes’ urban views were it not for Cain’s looser brushwork and suppression of all the usual commercial signage from these images of a gas station and convenience store. Devoid of the text and logos they would normally support, the blank display panels and banners assume an air of eerie expectation as they  become more perfectly “new” again–as if they were models of themselves, uncompromised by actual application in the real world. Cain’s cityscapes participate in an unexpected dialogue not only with Edward Hopper but with Hans Hoffman and late Mondrian. Vacant of figures,they suggest a world customized for cars–the subjects of Cain’s earlier paintings (exhibited at the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennials) that earned him a cult following before his untimely death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 at the age 37.

The deadpan depiction of cars, trucks, commercial graphics, and urban textures–glossy or gritty–attracted many of the original photorealists. This preoccupation with surfaces had more to do with the formal, pictorial, and illusionistic possibilities inherent in the appearance of these subjects than with any impulse toward critique or transformation. In a pair of 1989 paintings depicting the walls of a graffiti emblazoned underpass, London-based painter PAUL WINSTANELY demonstrates how the same, grungy urban subjects might be redeemed by the similar techniques. Rendered in foreshortened perspective, the cropped details of opposing walls, certain details obliterated by a blinding light at the terminus just past the frame, the uninflected pristine surfaces of these canvases imitate the texture of air brush–the very medium depicted in the painted image. The quotidian is rendered as a shimmering passage to the infinite.      

Funded by the Arcadia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Advisory Board and Friends of the Beaver College Art Gallery.