For Immediate Release: January 21, 2005
ELEANOR ANTIN
ROMAN ALLEGORIES
FEBRUARY 12 – MARCH 12
In Roman Allegories, Eleanor Antin's new series of large-scale, staged, and painterly photographs, a ragged band of traveling players journey through a ruined landscape. They are ancestors of the commedia dell’arte players who originated in the Graeco Roman world – the beautiful Columbine, the Lover, the Trickster, an ex-gladiator Strong Man, the Poet, and a magical little girl through whose eyes we see them wander among ruined temples, discarded columns, the dismembered limbs of abandoned statues. The artists move with the innocence of dreamers, through bacchanals of nymphs and satyrs, Sybil’s caves, decadent banquets, children's games, executions, theatrical performances, slowly picking their way over a beautiful, abandoned, broken landscape.
Antin, a pioneering conceptual and multidisciplinary artist, has been creating narrative images in photography, video and film, performance and installation for more than 35 years. From her classic photo piece, 100 Boots, through her archetypal personas – the King, the Ballerina and the Nurse – her narrative strategies were often comedic send-ups of Western cultural, political and sexual clichés but with dark undertones. However, in her work of the last five years, the darker tones begin to dominate in a secret world of myth and psychic anxiety that well up from the not-so-distant cradle of Western culture, projected through the screen of European painting from Poussin to the surrealists.
Antin's 2002 photographic exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, The Last Days of Pompeii, received the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) First Place Award for Best Show by a Mid-Career Artist. Those works have traveled to Vienna, Milan, Los Angeles, and San Diego. She has had numerous one-woman exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999, which traveled to the Washington University Museum in Saint Louis before touring the UK. She is represented in major public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 12, 6:00 – 8:00. Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 – 6:00. Monday by appointment. For information contact Laura Muggeo (212) 226-3232 or Laura@feldmangallery.com.
|
