Tag Archive "portraits"

Nick Cassway’s vinyl portraits at J.O.G.

Nick Cassway’s show of portraits of friends at JOG gallery has the immediacy of the snapshots that people post on the internet–unselfconscious, overindulgent, light-hearted and intimate. These are images that our ancestors eschewed–not that they didn’t do these things, but they didn’t parade their behavior in public or preserve the carefree moments for posterity.

The Seduction of Virtual Flesh: Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe at the MMA

If you’re not already familiar with the form, Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA, or The Met, through Aug. 14, 2011)  will introduce an under-appreciated medium at its height; and high it was. Popes and royalty chose pastels rather than painted portraits on occasion, as anyone will know who saw the wonderful exhibition of Jean-Étienne Liotard at the Frick Collection in 2006. It included the marvelous pastel portraits that Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, commissioned of her children, including the 7 year old Marie Antoinette (see below), who would marry Louis XV of ... More » »

Shibata’s roads, Modica’s boys of summer at 339

The pairing of photographic works by Toshio Shibata and Andrea Modica at Gallery 339 is inspired. From the sublime breadth of Shibata’s unpeopled highway landscapes to Modica’s specific, humanistic portraits of farm-league baseball players, the two excellent stand-alone exhibits reach across the gallery spaces in conversation with each other.

Mourning: Osorio and Munoz at PAFA and PMA

Maybe because Murray’s mother died a month ago (see his Op Ed in today’s Inquirer), two works in the big Philagrafika 2010 exhibit have been gnawing about me. Pepon Osorio at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has printed a blow-up of an X-ray image of his mother’s skull atop a thick, black bed of confetti, laid on the floor like a fresh grave. The installation is to honor the memory of his mother, who died recently. And the memorial suggests all the medical interventions that fail and the way an individual, irreplaceable and unique and loved, is quantified in ... More » »