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CAPITA

February 23 – March 29, 2018

Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy

UNTITLED V, 17 NOVEMBER 1985

1985

Acrylic on paper

30 1/8 x 22 1/8 inches

[photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York]

 

Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy

UNTITLED IV, 17 NOVEMBER 1985

1985

Acrylic on paper

30 1/4 x 22 1/2 inches

[photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York]

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden

110th Street Harlem Blues

c. 1972

Collage on paper

17 x 24 inches

[Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York]

Nancy Burson, Mankind (The images used are from a 19th-century book of racial sterotypes and

Nancy Burson

Mankind (The images used are from a 19th-century book of racial sterotypes and

were weighted to reflect current world population statistics)

1983-1985

Gelatin silver print from computer-generated negative

14 x 11 inches (sheet)

ed.  15/15

 

 

Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson

Businessman (10 Businessmen from Goldman Sachs)

1982

Gelatin silver print from computer-generated negative

14 x 11 (sheet)

ed. 1/15

 

Matthew Craven

Matthew Craven

GODDESS

2017

Ink and found images on found poster

60 x 40 inches

[Courtesy Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York]

 

Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy

EatF_3_21

2017

oil on canvas

15 x 19 inches

Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy

EATF_3_1

2016

oil on canvas

15 x 19 inches

 

John Edmonds

John Edmonds

Marchello

2017

archival pigment print on Japanese silk

50 x 40 inches

[Courtesy of the artist and ltd los angeles]

Emily Eveleth

Emily Eveleth
Trace I

2001
oil on canvas
26 x 32 inches
 

Emily Eveleth

Emily Eveleth

Trace II

2001

oil on canvas

32 x 30 inches

 

Jeff Grant

Jeff Grant

Round Nose

2016

Pencil and pigment on paper

24 x 18 inches

 

Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King
Myself with Other Eyes

1987-88
low-fired porcelain, glass eyes
5.5 x 3.25 x 3.75 inches

Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King
Mouth, Clay (from series "Eight Views of a Sculpture")

2008
Archival giclée print on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk paper
34 x 43 in.; 35 x 44 x 1-3/4 in. (framed)

Sarah Peters

Sarah Peters

Head of a Boy Vessel

2013

bronze

10 x 8 x 6 inches

Sarah Peters

Sarah Peters

Portrait of a Bearded Man

2014

bronze

14 x 8 x 9 inches

William Tucker

William Tucker

Good Soldier

1998

charcoal on paper

42.25 x 36 inches

William Tucker

William Tucker
The Good Soldier

1997
bronze
10 x 20.5 x 9 inches
2/6

Martha Wilson

Martha Wilson

new wrinkles on the subject

2014

pigmented ink print on Canson rag photographique

25 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches

ed. 3/5

[Courtesy of the Artist and P.P.O.W.]

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

installation view

Cap•i•ta [pl.] Head(s): the superior extremity of the human body, comprising the cranium and face, and containing the brain and organs of sight, hearing, taste, and smell.

 

Danese/Corey is pleased to announce the opening of CAPITA, curated by gallery staff member Brent Auxier. Included are works by twelve artists, across various mediums, that depict the human head in ways transcending a traditional sense of portraiture.  The work included in the exhibition use the head – the container of a sacred space – to convey human themes and concerns as varied as identity, desire, history, fiction, privilege, feminism, race, gender, and mortality.

 

Participating artists:

Don Bachardy

Romare Bearden

Nancy Burson

Matthew Craven

Anthony Cudahy

John Edmonds   

Emily Eveleth

Jeff Grant

Elizabeth King

Sarah Peters

William Tucker

Martha Wilson

 

 

Don Bachardy: Don Bachardy’s drawings of his long-time partner Christopher Isherwood are part of a larger series documenting the last six months of the esteemed writer’s life.  In Bachardy’s drawings of Isherwood’s last moments, the energy between artist and subject is palpable and poignant; Bachardy made almost daily drawings of his partner’s journey, an attempt to make even death a process the two could experience together.  The resulting portraits are witness to a mind and body in transition. (Cheim & Read, 2009)

 

Romare Bearden:  Bearden's primary medium was the collage, fusing painting, magazine clippings, old paper and fabric, like a jigsaw puzzle in upheaval. But unlike a puzzle, each piece of a Bearden collage has a meaning and history all its own.  “110th Street Harlem Blues is comprised of photographs taken by Sam Shaw during the filming of the 1972 crime drama, “Across 110th St.” That street, separating Harlem and Central Park, was considered a colloquial division between race and class during the film’s production in 1970’s New York.  (NPR, 2013)

 

Nancy BursonIn the eighties, Burson collaborated on a computer program that used morphing technology to create uncanny composite photographs. As frontal as mug shots, the pictures are relics of the age before Photoshop, but their ghostly, out-of-focus layering remains oddly unsettling…She blends races and sexes, as if forecasting the advent of new norms, but a merger of ten white male executives from Goldman Sachs offers a counterpoint by predicting more of the same... (Vince Aletti, 2014).

 

Matthew CravenMatthew Craven uses found images collaged onto obsessively drawn patterns to suggest the primacy of geometric abstraction in our visual vocabulary. Often buying several copies of the same vintage textbook, he repeats images of ancient art and archaeological remains to mirror geometric patterns inspired by decoration of North and South American indigenous origin. Attentive to physicality, his laboriously hand-drawn pieces are on the backs of old movie posters, adding another layer of age. Craven's fusions erase particularity, implying that patterns and perhaps histories across cultures start to reflect rather than oppose each other. (Asya Geisberg Gallery).

 

Anthony Cudahy: These paintings are appropriated from two photographs taken of the attendees of a funeral, sitting in the pews of a church, looking forward. The back of one of the original photographs has "1950 Mother's Funeral" written in cursive in the top left corner. In this long-term series of paintings, each member of the crowd (well over a hundred) is to be rendered their own individual portrait. The viewers are turned into the subjects.

 

John Edmonds: ..do-rags, Edmonds said, are for celebrating. In contemporary black culture, whether worn by men or women, in public or as part of a private beauty regimen, they impart a majestic quality on the heads they adorn. He said, I look at them always as crowns. (Lauretta Charlton, 2017).

 

Emily Eveleth: Emily Eveleth’s figurative paintings of heads are containers of such emotion that each of their beings seems entirely absorbed by it, as if they have swallowed its portent; it is Eveleth’s great strength as a painter, that the back of a neck, a shoulder or an ear can convey such intensity.  And yet these are quiet paintings.  The body is both originator and receptacle of the message, but the nature of the message does not need to be conveyed to us: it’s implicit. (Betsy Sussler, 2002)

 

Jeff Grant: Grant’s “Round nose”, part of an on-going series of head drawings, departs from the figurative portrait, instead, exhibiting what could be recognized as a partially formed head; ageless and undetermined in its expression. The individual components of the face are just that; parts arranged or hovering in a vaguely human arrangement.

 

Elizabeth King: I am a sculptor, King resolutely declares. This is more than evident in her precisely rendered, clearly observed porcelain heads, most of which are self-portraits rendered at half-scale.  King, shy on the subject, has paraphrased artist Adrian Piper: Just because my work is autobiographical doesn’t mean it’s about me. Her “self” portraits are universally us.

 

Sarah Peters: With her recent pieces in bronze…Peters marvelously adopts the stylized stateliness of ancient Mediterranean statuary. Her cast, life-size heads carry delicately groomed hair atop elegantly structured faces, and though eyes are left as cavities, each head somehow maintains the clear, forthright gaze of an emperor or goddess. (Sara Christoph, 2015)

 

William Tucker: Tucker’s figurative sculptures are both universal and archaic, but also decidedly contemporary, reflecting the tensions and energies of sculpture-making in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Comparisons to Rodin, Giacometti and de Kooning are inescapable. The references are not always what they seem in Tucker’s work, however. His reality is much more ambiguous and complex. If we think we know what Tucker’s sculptures are about, they continue to be elusive presences, deliberately challenging our preconceptions about their making and meaning and our notions of what sculpture can and should be. (Julia Kelly, 2014)

 

Martha Wilson: Beginning in the 1970s, in her conceptually based performance, video and photo-text works, Wilson masqueraded as a man in drag, catalogued various body parts, manipulated her appearance with makeup and explored the effects of "camera presence" in self-representation. Although this work was made in isolation from any feminist community, it has been seen to contribute significantly to what would become feminism's most enduring preoccupations: the investigation of identity and embodied subjectivity. (Jane Wark, 2001)

 

For further information please contact the gallery at 212-223-2227 or contact@danese.com.

@DaneseCorey

 

We are deeply grateful to the following galleries for their cooperation and assistance:

Cheim & Read, ClampArt, DC Moore, Asya Geisberg Gallery, LMAKGallery, ltd los angeles, P.P.O.W, Allan Stone Projects, Van Doren Waxter