In the Galleries - Figure Studies CLOSES April 22 at CAM (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis)

Location Info

Map

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

3750 Washington Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108

Category: Galleries

Region: St. Louis - Grand Center

Photos

2 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Related Content

• In the Galleries - Nowhere Backwards CLOSES November 17 at Des Lee
  November 15, 2012
• St. Louis Art Capsules
  April 7, 2011
• St. Louis Art Capsules
  April 28, 2011
• Art Incarcerated
  March 10, 2011
• St. Louis Art Capsules
  April 14, 2011

More About

• Tom Reed
• Dominic Molon
• John Bankston
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Visual Arts

For this refreshingly unassuming and clear-eyed exhibit of recent drawings, prints and mixed-media works on paper, curator Dominic Molon selected six contemporary artists whose practice involves that ever-durable muse: the figure. Recovering a medium and mode of art-making otherwise designated second-class or passé, the artists all betray a winking awareness of the peculiarity of their modest project, displaying as much via unsentimental homages to kitsch or historical antecedents. Highlights include Ida Applebroog's witheringly slender women rendered in grease-colored tones on Mylar, which resonate as eerily lascivious versions of Giacomettis as they leer and gape with photo-realistic lips and eyes. John Bankston seems to take Tom of Finland as a blank slate in need of updating, reimagining his homoerotic beefcake idylls to include African Americans, drag queens and flourishes of wild abstraction, all rendered in coloring-book lines and rainbow-crayon scrawls. St. Louis-based artist Tom Reed, meanwhile, peoples his complex, neo-Outsider drawings with bears, birds and the rustic dwellings of campers or pioneers. Drawn atop patched-together substrates of word-find puzzles, comics and graph paper, Reed's tableaus depict a world where forest-dwelling animals reign sovereign and "home" is any kind of fort. They pull you in with the ease of an oft-told fable, though what seems so vaguely familiar clearly isn't. Also included are works by Jennifer Bornstein, Alejandro Cardenas and Djordje Ozbolt. Through April 22 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard; 314-535-4660 or www.camstl.org. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sun.