EXPO CHICAGO 2024
11 - 14 April, 2024
Navy Pier, Chicago, Booth 355
www.expochicago.com
REAL, REALLY REAL, SUPER REAL
Real, Really Real, Surreal, Super-real
From the earliest cave paintings depicting humans and animals that roamed the earth, the conversation about realism has been ongoing. More than 50 years ago (In 1972) Documenta devoted its entire exhibition to “Realism,” showing representational works by incarcerated artists as well as presenting “Photorealism,” as a “movement” for the first time.
Several of NHG’s artists engage the dialogue of representation in the broadest range and definition of the term, “real.” There are many ways to define “real” and to explore it visually.
REAL
Lucy Mackenzie paints from life on an intimate scale. Her subjects are primarily still lifes and range from flowers to pewter pots to a pile of folded summer shirts. Each of her 4 x 4 inch oil paintings is a perfectly observed ordinary subject that becomes extra-ordinary in her hands. Each painting is a tiny jewel, each a touchstone to a larger life story. More real than real these works are meditations on perception.
SUPER-REAL
Don Eddy, on the other hand, is one of the original group of Photorealists whose work was included in Documenta 1972. Eddy takes his own photographs, which become his subject matter. Unlike other photorealists, he does not project a photo or slide on to the canvas and copy it, he draws onto the canvas from a photograph making a kind of map only he can follow. He then paints three layers of underpainting followed by 20-30 layers of transparent color to achieve the final color of his works. Some of the acrylic works are triptychs, others polyptychs. His subjects range from the urban cityscape to pure nature. He is fascinated by the infrastructure of cities, especially the bridges that pepper Manhattan Island. And during the pandemic he became involved with the intricate “machinery” that make up the rides at Coney Island, much like mechanical jewelry in motion.
REALLY REAL
In Nathalia Edenmont’s monumental scale portraits everything is real. She spends up to twelve hours with a team of ten people to compose a dress for her models, sometimes using flowers, at others using fruits or vegetables. The artist uses an 8 x 10 sinar camera to capture her images. Nothing is digitized or photoshopped, it is analog photography, all real. If she does not get what she wants with a click of the camera, the photo session is a loss. Her models do not smile; they face the camera looking into eternity at varying metaphoric life stages. Her photographs of eggs are her newest series. She moistens and shapes goose eggs into configurations she wants to photographs. Essentially, she sculpts her eggs first then photographs them and magnifies them in scale.
REAL
Nicolas Africano’s glass sculptures are inspired by “real life.” His wife is his model and muse. For more than 20 years he has been making figures in glass. His newest works incorporate myth in the figures of Daphne who was turned into a laurel tree by Gaia. Yet, the realness of the figure remains, and is now surrounded by trees in blossom as she tries to flee. The works on view are from an earlier moment in the artist’s work of his wife, always his muse, one in a dress sewn by the artist, the other translucent in a gossamer skirt, timeless images.
SURREAL
Judy Fox has worked in terra cotta making sculpture and painting it with casein paint for years. She is known for her eccentric figures. Her newest body of work, entitled Harvest, is a series of fruits and vegetables. These biomorphic sculptures, a banquet of diverse and richly painted fruits and vegetables, are quite true to life, modeled on actual produce found in the market or posted on the Internet. Farm produce is cultivated to look tasty and robust. But these subjects are marred in ways that resonate with the viewer. As in earlier surrealist work, Fox’s fruits and vegetables are shaped by the fundaments of life. Their carved flesh dramatizes processes that animate and threaten all bodies, including our own: fertility, growth, overgrowth, malformation, violence, disease, and the persistence of beauty. Among other artists included in the gallery’s presentation and exploration of the “colors” of realism:
Joseph Raffael, Hung Liu, Michael Gregory, Timothy Cummings, Jody Guralnick, Nancy Koenigsberg and Tiffany Shlain
