FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Ellen Jones Pryor: 615.243.1311, ”, ”
Emily Harper: 615.744.3331, ”
CHUCK CLOSE, GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, SURREALISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY
AND FILM, PAINT MADE FLESH HIGHLIGHT
2009 EXHBITIONS AT FRIST CENTER
Key Exhibitions Organized by Frist Center Will Travel to
The Phillips Collection, International Center of Photography
NASHVILLE, TENN.—(August 22, 2008)—The Frist Center for the Visual Arts launches two major exhibitions in 2009—Paint Made Flesh and The City in Twilight: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris 1924–1939—that will each travel to prominent U.S. art museums during the year. After its Nashville debut, Paint Made Flesh will travel to The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) and the Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, N.Y.). The exhibition will include paintings by artists including Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Pablo Picasso, Julian Schnabel, Jenny Saville and Wangechi Mutu among others, on loan from private collections and museums throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vanderbilt University Press will publish the exhibition catalogue in January 2009. The City in Twilight will travel to two venues as well, including the International Center of Photography (New York, N.Y.) and the Telfair Museum (Savannah, Ga.). The exhibition will feature more than 120 photographs by Man Ray, Eugène Atget, Brassaї and others, and a catalogue will be published by the University of California Press.
Paint Made Flesh
Jan. 23–May 10, 2009
Upper-Level Galleries
Paint Made Flesh presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the carnal properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin. As a revisionist study of post-World War II art, the exhibition offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability. The exhibition includes works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Eric Fischl, Georg Baselitz, Jenny Saville, Wangechi Mutu, John Currin, Cecily Brown, Daniel Richter and others.
The exhibition is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts by Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Center.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a full-color illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by Vanderbilt University Press, with essays by Mark Scala and Susan H. Edwards, Ph.D., executive director of the Frist Center, as well as by noted scholars Emily Braun, Ph.D., professor of art history at Hunter College (New York, N.Y.) and Richard Shiff, Ph.D., professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Paint Made Flesh will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., June 20–Sept. 13, 2009; and to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y. Oct. 24, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010.
Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art
Feb. 13–June 7, 2009
Ingram Gallery
The Cleveland Museum of Art possesses one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of early Christian, Byzantine, and medieval European art in the world. It includes rare examples of ivories, enamels, sculpture, paintings and illuminated manuscripts from the third through the 16th centuries. Presenting approximately 100 works of art, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view these extraordinary treasures outside of Cleveland.
This exhibition has been organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Mike Hoolboom: Imitations of Life
Feb. 13–June 7, 2009
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Toronto-based independent filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s Imitations of Life integrates images drawn from mainstream cinema, newsreels and science fiction films. Sequences of deconstructed and recombined scenes, variously haunting and playful, hypnotically cast the cumulative affect of film as a force shaping our subconscious images in relation to the stream of history and the trajectory of humanity.
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings
May 29–Aug. 23, 2009
Upper-Level Galleries
This exhibition explores important trends in contemporary museum architecture. Twenty-six of the world’s leading museum building projects that have been realized since the turn of the century will
be illustrated by sketches, architectural plans, photographs and models. Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalog of critical essays by renowned architectural historians and critics who discuss the projects in the context of their cultural and urban environments. Museums in the 21st Century will also focus on the relationship between architecture and fine arts and the issue of museum functionality in modern times.
Organized by Art Centre Basel, Switzerland.
Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration
June 26–Sept. 13, 2009
Ingram Gallery
While Chuck Close is renowned for his signature gridded portrait paintings, derived from photographs and transferred onto the canvas using various systems of mark making, he has also experimented with etching, aquatint, woodcut, silkscreen and other printing techniques throughout his career. This exhibition is a comprehensive survey of his output as a printmaker and collaborator with master printers, spanning more than 30 years.
Organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston.
Dean Byington: New Works
June 26–Sept. 13, 2009
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Oakland, California-based artist Dean Byington creates large collaged paintings, comprising dense accumulations of such fantastic imagery as anthropomorphic animals and topographical views of enchanted lands as if seen from a distant mountaintop.
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
The City in Twilight: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris 1924–1939
Sept. 10, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010
Ingram Gallery
Including more than 120 photographs by such artists as Man Ray, Eugène Atget, Brassaї, Hans Bellmer and André Kertész, The City in Twilight will celebrate Paris as the literal and metaphoric foundation of Surrealism. In addition to examining the revolutionary social, aesthetic and political activities of the movement between the world wars, the exhibition will focus on works—predominantly photographs as well as select films, books and period ephemera—that evoke the
mystery of the chance encounters experienced by the Surrealists as they wandered through the labyrinthine city streets.
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, guest curator Therese Lichtenstein, Ph.D.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a full-color illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by the University of California Press, with essays by Dr. Lichtenstein, as well as by other noted scholars, including British historian Colin Jones, Julia Kelly, lecturer at the University of Manchester; and Whitney Chadwick, professor of art at San Francisco State University.
The exhibition will travel to the International Center of Photography in New York,
Jan. 29–May 9, 2010, and to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga. June 4–Sept. 30, 2010.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Times: American Modernism from the Lane Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Oct. 2, 2009–Jan. 31, 2010
Ingram Gallery
In the 1950s, William H. Lane (1914–1995), the owner of a small Massachusetts manufacturing plant, began assembling an extraordinary collection of American modern art, which in 1990 was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. With major paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur G. Dove, Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler and other artists, the exhibition shows the collector’s passion for art that reflects the diversity and dynamism of American modernism.
The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Oliver Herring: Sculpture and Video
Oct. 2, 2009–Jan. 31, 2010
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
New York-based artist Oliver Herring collaborates with friends and strangers in the creation of his sculptures, performances and video art. This exhibition includes figurative works in which the artist first makes photographic close-ups of his subjects’ entire bodies. He then sculpts the form of their bodies out of polystyrene. The photographs are cut into jigsaw puzzle-like shapes and adhered to the sculpted figures, lending the uncanny quality of a photograph seen in the round. Herring manipulates the color and value contrasts in his photographic fragments, giving the sculptures a camouflage-like surface, emphasizing the inherent artificiality and social masking that are a subliminal consequence of photography.
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
About the Frist Center
Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, Tenn., is an art exhibition center dedicated to presenting the finest visual art from local, regional, U.S. and international sources in a program of changing exhibitions. The Frist Center’s Martin ArtQuest Gallery features more than 30 interactive stations relating to Frist Center exhibitions. Gallery admission to the Frist Center is free for visitors 18 and younger and to Frist Center members. Frist Center admission is $8.50 for adults, $7.50 for seniors and military and $6.50 for college students with ID. Thursday evenings, 5–9 p.m., admission is free for college students with a valid college ID. Discounts are offered for groups of 10 or more with advance reservation by calling 615.744.3246. The Frist Center is open seven days a week: Mondays through Wednesdays, and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. and Sundays, 1–5:30 p.m., with the Frist Center Café opening at noon. Additional information is available by calling 615.244.3340 or by visiting our Web site at http://www.fristcenter.org.
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