Nudes
Samuel Jablon speaks with artist Heather Morgan about scandalous women, female identity, and the “peculiar kind of intensity” that informs her work.
Martha Wilson’s solo exhibition, I have become my own worst fear, is up at P.P.O.W. gallery through October 8th. Lauren Bakst delves into the many faces of Martha Wilson, examining their relationships to the passing of time, the embodiment of aging, and the intertwining of the personal and political.
Portraiture is about many things: how the subject relates to the photographer or painter, and where the subject’s gaze lies.
Browsing through her diaries in preparation for a retrospective monograph to be published by Scalo books, Tina Barney realized she’d been contemplating photographing nudes since the 1980s
David Seidner’s photographic work is rooted in his search for the “right moment”—informed by his deep knowledge and appreciation of classical Greek art.
“I’m trying to find out what my relationship to the body is, the comfort and discomfort, the appropriate and the inappropriate.”
Two paintings, watercolor on paper and oil on linen, titled The Artist, and Prick, by Katharine Kuharic.
Their legs are offered to the viewer in a vase of shadow and stone. One kicks like a stem tilts. They are clearly angels’ legs, celestial dancers, moving on an axis of stilled time. So does Venus, emerging from cloth like a snake in a basket, her own snake and her own apple. Stiff dead Egyptians can be sexy, sensuous like a fossil with a heartbeat. The most overtly sexy female in her Empire recliner is more removed. Her chaise, like a vitrine, shows her off but it offers her less.
The landscapes are where the blackness lives in the photographs. The blackness has its own inner density, printed with absoluteness like a mezzotint. How can we get to the light when the darkness and weight are so inviting? The mossy fountain burgeons with life, a vanitas. The waterfall fountain is a thing unto itself like the Venus, its own dais and its own axis, turning almost imperceptibly. It spills to renew itself.
—April Gornik
A discussion between long-time BOMB contributor Gary Indiana and the late Robert Mapplethorpe on the New York art scene of the late 1980s and the difficulties of intimacy, comfort and eroticism in photography and portraiture.
Two black and white photographs of nudes, titled Self Portrait, Side View Walking and Self Portrait, Reclining Torso, Arms Folded by John Coplans.
David Salle and Georgia Marsh touch upon the lines drawn between pornography and eroticism, penetration and degradation, and the “tender gesture” of drawing.
Taylor Mead, Alf Young, and Jon Leon take a trip down memory lane reminiscing on moments of spontaneous naturalism, nude beaches, and being an outsider.
