THE HUMAN STAIN

May 17 – June 22, 2019

Opening Reception, Friday, May 17th from 5–10 PM

Portraiture in Western art history has ranged from didactic depictions of the Virgin and Child by Duccio, to virtuosic flourishes of aspirational bourgeoisie sitters by John Singer Sargent. Picasso showed us Gertrude Stein as a distorted account of visual subjectivity; De Kooning gave us a portrait of a woman that verged on pure abstraction. The portrait has a diverse history, but its variation still lies mostly on a spectrum of objective physical description. 

“The Human Stain” features work that focuses on the individual as a verb rather than a noun. It looks to the portrait as a document of human impressions, traces, remainders and random collisions with the physical world as an alternative to the traditional portrait as a symbol of individual presence.