PDX Art Museum
Kingdom Animalia
Furry, fierce, majestic, or sublime, animals have been featured in the graphic arts since the advent of printmaking. Mammals, fish, reptiles, and birds act as rich allegorical symbols, precise scientific specimens, and vehicles for pure formal expression. Drawn from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition offers a 500-year sampling of the wide-ranging depiction of the kingdom Animalia in prints, drawings, and posters, from the playful to the ferocious. Artists as diverse as Albrecht Dürer, John James Audubon, Eugène Delacroix, and Pablo Picasso are joined by regional favorites Beth Van Hoesen and Frank Boyden, among others, in this lively exploration of artful animals.
The Wyeths
Drawing from the Bank of America Collection, The Wyeths: Three Generations provides a revealing survey of works by N.C. Wyeth, one of America’s finest illustrators; his son Andrew, an important realist painter; Andrew’s son Jamie, a popular portraitist; and members of the extended family. Visitors will explore 74 paintings and drawings by artists from three generations of the Wyeth family, all showcasing a commitment to realism, technical brilliance, and narrative sensibility.
Tony Cragg
Turner Prize-winning sculptor Tony Cragg emerged in the late 1970s with a bold practice that questioned and tested the limits of a wide variety of traditional sculptural materials, including bronze, steel, glass, wood, and stone. “I’m an absolute materialist, and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime,” he has said. Eschewing factory fabrication of his works, Cragg has been known to merge contemporary industrial materials with the suggestion of the functional forms of mundane objects and ancient vessels—like jars, bottles, and test tubes—resulting in sublime, sinuous, and twisting forms. One of his best-known works is Terris Novalis (1997), an enormous, enigmatic public steel sculpture of engineering instruments. “When I’m involved in making sculpture, I’m looking for a system of belief or ethics in the material,” he says. “I want that material to have a dynamic, to push and move and grow.
Modern & Contemporary Pieces
Night Truck
Mark di Suvero's early works were large outdoor pieces that incorporated wooden timbers from demolition buildings, tires, scrap metal and structural steel. This exploration has transformed over time into a focus on H-beams and heavy steel plates. Many of the pieces contain sections that are allowed to swing and rotate giving the overall forms a considerable degree of motion. He prides himself on his hands-on approach to the fabrication and installation of his work. Di Suvero pioneered the use of a crane as a sculptor's working tool.
Le Gong C’est Une Lune (The Gong is the Moon)
American artist Alexander Calder changed the course of modern art by developing an innovative method of sculpting, bending, and twisting wire to create three-dimensional “drawings in space.” Resonating with the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as the language of early nonobjective painting, Calder’s mobiles (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931 to describe his work) consist of abstract shapes made of industrial materials––often poetic and gracefully formed and at times boldly colored––that hang in an uncanny, perfect balance. His complex assemblage Cirque Calder (1926–31), which allowed for the artist’s manipulation of its various characters presented before an audience, predated Performance Art by some 40 years. Later in his career, Calder devoted himself to making outdoor monumental sculptures in bolted sheet steel that continue to grace public plazas in cities throughout the world.
Forest Devil
Though his work has been compared to that of an engineer, Snelson is careful to assert that his art is separate from engineering.
“Engineers make structures for specific uses, to support something, to hold something, to do something,” he writes on his website. “My sculptures serve only to stand up by themselves and to reveal a particular form such as a tower or a cantilever or a geometrical order probably never seen before; all of this because of a desire to unveil, in whatever ways I can, the wondrous essence of elementary structure.”
La Porta (The Door)
Arnaldo Pomodoro is a contemporary Italian sculptor known for his geometric bronze works. His sculptures often contain tears or stalagmite-like aberrations, appearing to be caught in the process of gradually transforming into another object altogether. Throughout his practice, Pomodoro has created multiple versions of his Sphere within a Sphere in a variety of scales, from monumental outdoor commissioned pieces to small, handheld works. Born on June 23, 1926 in Morciano, Italy, he went on to study stage design and goldsmithing, eventually moving to Milan where he met avant-garde artists like Lucio Fontana. Today, Pomodoro’s work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Art Institute Chicago, among others. He lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Indigenous Art
Both historic and contemporary
Funerary Portraits
Richard and Deanne Rubinstein Gallery
Monet & Rysselberghe
Picturing Oregon
In conjunction with the Museum’s 125th anniversary, Picturing Oregon offers an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the importance of place and to celebrate the incredible geographic diversity of Oregon, and the artists whose work it inspired.
With its wide-ranging climate and expansive range of natural features, Oregon’s landscape has long been an inspiration for artists. The western side boasts miles of coastline offering vistas of dunes and spires, while abundant rain cycles further inland result in dense, forested mountains, mossy urban areas, and bountiful agriculture. Set in the “rain shadow” of the Cascades, arid eastern Oregon is characterized by desert landforms and vast, dramatic terrain.
Picturing Oregon presents paintings and photographs inspired by the distinct regions that comprise the state—the Coast; Greater Portland; Mount Hood and the Columbia River Gorge; Willamette Valley; Central Oregon; Eastern Oregon; and Southern Oregon. The exhibition features works from the late 1800s, including Oregon’s pioneer period, and touches on contemporary pieces—all from the Museum’s permanent collection.
Celebrated artists depicting this diverse ecological state include William Samuel Parrott, Charles McKim, C.E.S. Wood, Childe Hassam, and Charles Heaney, among others. Louis Bunce, Amanda Snyder, Michael Brophy, and Roll Hardy offer an abstract and a contemporary lens to the landscape. Picturing Oregon will also feature a selection of photography, which has served an important role in capturing the region, including works by Lily White, Myra Albert Wiggins, Sarah Ladd, Drex Brooks, and Douglas Frank.
Animating Life
This fall, the Portland Art Museum and the Northwest Film Center celebrate Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA, a groundbreaking view behind-the-curtain into the visionary artistry and technology of the globally renowned animation studio.
At the heart of every LAIKA film are the artists who meticulously craft every element. Through behind-the-scenes photography, video clips and physical artwork from its films, visitors will be immersed in LAIKA’s creative process, exploring the production design, sets, props, puppets, costumes, and world-building that have become the studio’s hallmarks. Their films are a triumph of imagination, ingenuity and craftsmanship and have redefined the limits of modern animation.
“Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center are thrilled to partner with LAIKA to present the wonders of this distinct enterprise,” said Brian Ferriso, The Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Director and Chief Curator of the Portland Art Museum. “LAIKA at its core is an artistic endeavor that embraces the past and infuses it with a 21st-century vision. LAIKA’s aesthetic vocabulary continues to be shaped by the people and uniqueness of this special state.”
Blossom Gatherer I
White Cube Mason's Yard presented 'Paradise Lost', a new series of work by the London based artist Raqib Shaw. Historically, John Milton's epic poem, based on the Fall of Man, has inspired artists such as William Blake or Gustave Doré, yet Shaw steers away from this grand narrative to create a visionary ode to his own childhood memories and imaginary paradise.
A departure point for the new series of work is 'The Mild-Eyed Melancholy of the Lotus Eaters' (2009-2010) which refers to Homer's 'Odyssey' and more directly, the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson who described the narcotic effects of the lotus flower when eaten by a group of mariners. Shaw depicts a pond carpeted with lotus flowers that appear to have intoxicated the various creatures and figures, languishing in a state of carnal inertia.
Amongst the rampant pond life, lotus flowers reappear in the two pools of 'Narcissus' (2011) based, in principle, on those found in the gardens of Versailles. Presented in the ground floor gallery, these exquisitely painted bronze sculptures mirror each other as a swan lurches over and pecks the innards of a hybrid man, whose vampire features scream as blood streams from his brutally gouged out eye-sockets. The figures cast from the body of the artist, tentatively balance on one foot like a Hindu Chola bronze of Nataraja, the dance of the destroyer. Shaw revises Ovid's account of 'Narcissus', the moment when a lone youth first admires his reflection while drinking from a pond to this endangered moment of self-discovery, where in union these blinded figures are castrated from seeing their own agony and demise. This mortal combat also draws comparison with the Greek myth, the rape of Leda by Zeus and the death scene in Tchaikovsky's ballet 'Swan Lake'. Partly inspired by the King Ludvig II of Bavaria whose insignia was the majestic swan, the ballet's moral battle of good versus the evil here is subverted as the black and white birds attack with mutual voracity and violation.
Ode to the Lost Moon when the Nightingale was Set Free I
Shaw stages his 'Paradise Lost' paintings according to a specific time, climate and season. On one side of the gallery, three paintings depict a wintry mountainous nightscape, centrally lit by a full moon while on the opposite wall, spring blossoms as the sun creeps over the horizon. These paintings are mirrored in format as two octagon-shaped paintings sit either side of an elliptical panorama, each depicting a lone or contemplative character attempting an impossible feat. One waits attentively for moonbeams to drop in to an ornate chalice while another swings from the trees randomly catching the falling blossoms or one of the many circling swallows. All these figures appear preordained or literally bound to these futile tasks while the wildlife actively seek and attack their prey of all denominations.
The culmination of this imagery pours into the first chapter of the trilogy 'Paradise Lost' (2011), Shaw's largest painting to date. Here the viewer embarks on a journey from the aspirations of the lone figure who alongside a wolf howls before the bitter moon to the natural carnage as the dawn breaks. Shaw heralds all this by depicting the release of a single nightingale from its cage, a bird favored by the poets as creative with a spontaneous song. Then, as seasons pass, a flight of swallows migrate south symbolizing an inherent free spirit and desire to return to a place of origin. This notion is at the heart of Shaw's paradise - a romantic yearning for a bygone era, where innocence and beauty prevailed - a personal mythology that embodies hope, disillusionment and the underlying entropy of life.
Arrival of the Horse King
Born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir, Raqib Shaw left India in 1998 for London where he studied at Central St Martins School of Art. Shaw has exhibited internationally, most notably in 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), '6th Gwangju Biennale', South Korea, (2006), 'Around the world in Eighty Days', ICA, London (2006) and 'Without Boundary', MoMA New York (2006). Major solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Wien (2009), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008), Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2006) and 'Art Now', Tate Britain (2006). In October, Shaw will be involved in two group shows: 'Painting Between the Lines' at the CCA Wattis, San Francisco and 'A Dream of Eternity' at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels.