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GORGEOUS: Confronting Beauty in Some Extreme Forms

[Guest post from artist Tracey Adams who currently has her own show at the Bryant Street Gallery,  Palo Alto, and K. Imperial Fine Arts, San Francisco.   In addition, The Huffington Post interviewed Tracey in “Everything in My Life Is Interconnected” on art, music and math.]

 0904-14-Gorgeous-exhibition-majorLast week I had the pleasure of seeing GORGEOUS, an exhibition of works  from both the SFMOMA and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.  The curators mentioned, this exhibition is not about the context or meanings of the objects. Rather, the focus is on what the objects look like and how we react to them.  What grabbed me the most were the text plaques alongside each piece. The subject of Beauty is one I’ve been exploring and reading about for the last 2 years. I’m including a few highlights from the “Gorgeous” catalog:  excerpted text  from the curators, Allison Harding and Forrest McGill.  

 Lotus-deer-and-maple-leaves-1800-50-School-of-Sakai-Hoitsu-set-of-3-hanging-scrolls-ink-and-colors-on-silk“The gorgeous challenges the limits of conventional beauty, often approaching the grotesque, abject, overwrought or kitsch. It catches us off guard with an attraction to that other thing, the under belly, where beauty gets messy and unpredictable. Some may feel attracted, others repulsed. We can’t look away. S/he may not be beautiful; s/he is gorgeous.”

“Beauty is always bizarre. I do not mean to say that it is voluntarily, coldly bizarre…I mean that it always contains a bit of strangeness, not intentional, but unconscious, and it is this strangeness in particular that creates Beauty…Reverse the proposition, and try to conceive of a commonplace beauty!” – Charles BaudelaireEllsworth-Kelly-ntitled-Mandorla-1988-bronze

 

Go experience GORGEOUS at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, through September 14, 2014!

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