What are you looking at when you look at someone’s face or body? A new group show at LA’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery explores exactly this as they delve into the physical female form, though you wouldn’t always know it.
About Face features paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video from six different artists whose works examine the female figure through scale, cropping, and abstraction. The power of this defamiliarization isn’t even diminished by the self-portraits included in the exhibit, curated by Kristina Kite and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer.
Joan Brown‘s portraits in particular depict a sort of calmly steadfast but also Dianic representation of women and of herself. In contrast, Brian Calvin‘s oil paintings make use of cropping to draw attention to the minutia of the female body. His Mouthfeel series, close-up paintings of women’s mouths, manages to escape the realm of eroticism and instead evokes the tender locomotion of a mouth in mid-thought.
The more abstract pieces also bear mentioning. Dianna Molzan‘s “Untitled” brings to mind a Weeping Woman mashed together with a Miró sculpture and a found-art picture frame. The female body also takes on its architectural form in the bodice drawings of Christina Ramberg and Diane Simpson‘s almost-haute-couture sculptures. Some of the other pieces are so heavily geometric that the female form is nearly indecipherable.
Despite the medium, there is a wonderful truth buried in all of these works: the fact that everybody and every body has the right to self-determination and freedom from reductionism.
About Face is on view until August 29th. Click here for more information on the artists and Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery.
All photos courtesy of the Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery.
