About the Museum
Press Release
CONTACT
Matt Montgomery
401/454-6793, mmontgom@risd.edu
The RISD Museum of Art Presents Nature/Artifice: Contemporary Works from the Collection
On View: Friday, April 25, 2009 through February 2010
Providence, RI—The RISD Museum of Art presents Nature/Artifice: Contemporary Works from the Collection featuring a selection of 13 paintings, sculptures, and video art, all of which explore the relationship between the natural and the manmade. The upper Farago Gallery serves as a permanent space devoted to rotating installations of works from the Museum’s Contemporary Art Department, many of which highlight recent acquisitions. The gallery offers visitors a regular chance to see a sampling of artworks that represent current developments and underscore common themes.
A number of the works in Nature/Artifice are large and arresting including Christian Marclay’s cascading waterfall made of audiotape, Tony Capellan’s sea-like expanse of blue flip flop sandals, and Richard Long’s Mountainside Ellipse made of stones from Greece arranged on the gallery floor. In some cases, natural materials—a lemon, thistles, or rocks, for example—are placed in artful arrangements or altered to extend their significance. Conversely, fabricated materials—ranging from audiotape to computer-generated imagery—are configured to resemble such natural phenomena as a cascading waterfall or a storm. Most of the works featured here are recent acquisitions being shown for the first time including a mandala-like work created by Damien Hirst out of butterfly wings. The Hirst piece, titled Utopia (2008), includes hundreds of butterflies mounted in paint. Like some of the other works, it was acquired by the Richard Brown Baker Fund for Contemporary British Art.
Artists range from acclaimed international figures to those who have gained recognition in the region. Capri-Batterie (Capri Battery) by Joseph Beuys, the seminal post-war German artist, incorporates a real lemon with a light bulb and plug socket. This iconic work, which deals with energy exchange, was created when Beuys was recovering from a lung illness on the Italian island of Capri. Rhode Island-based artist Sue McNally starts each canvas outdoors in the landscape, then continues painting in her studio, merging representation with subjective impression. King’s Beach, for example, is a recognizable view of one of Newport’s scenic sites, but its clouds, sea, and rock formations are stylized and abstracted into basic geometric forms.
A computer-generated work by Julian Opie--View of Matsuzaki Bay in the Rain from Route 136, (2007) — presents a scene based on photographs the artist took on a road trip through Japan. Drawing on the classic Japanese woodblock prints One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by the 19th-century master Utagawa Hiroshige, Opie’s landscape series diverges in subject matter from his well-known figurative works. The animated but contemplative scene features the sound and movement of rain and traffic along the highway.
Paul Morrison’s painting Rhizophore, 2006 may seem familiar to some Museum visitors because it resembles the black-and-white palette and botanical subject matter seen in his mural installation commissioned for the Museum’s Fain Education Gallery. Inspired by a range of art forms from different eras, including botanical illustrations, etchings, woodblock prints, landscape paintings, Pop art, wallpaper design, and cartoons, Morrison digitally manipulates found plant imagery.
Also on view are important works by Roger Hiorns, who was recently nominated for Britain’s Turner Prize, Yeondoo Jung, Jeanne Silverthorne, Duane Slick, and Cathy Wilkes.
PROGRAMMING
Gallery Conversation: King’s Beach
Thursday, June 18, 6 pm (Gallery Night)
Sue McNally speaks about her painting, King’s Beach, featured in the exhibition Nature/Artifice. This expressionist depiction of one of Newport’s well-known sites is based on the artist’s direct observation of nature, but the palette and composition are subsequently altered in her studio. Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, moderates the conversation.
Reporters, please contact Matt Montgomery at 401/454-6793 to arrange a visit to the exhibition, interviews, or to request exhibition images for publication.
The RISD Museum of Art, a world-class museum in Providence, RI, was founded as part of Rhode Island School of Design in 1877. Its permanent collection of more than 84,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art from every part of the world, including objects from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and art of all periods from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, up to the latest in contemporary art. In addition, the Museum offers a wide array of educational and public programs to more than 100,000 visitors annually.
