Main Gallery, Project Space
Intimate Impressions: Figures, Studies and Abstractions
Janet Cardiff, Graham Coughtry, Harold Klunder and Jeannie Thib
October 18, 2024 – November 23, 2024
From epic proportions to small scale, the prints in the Intimate Impressions: Figures, Studies and Abstractions exhibition—each created at Open Studio and originally collected for the studio archive—are united through their exploration of the figure and intimacy.
Janet Cardiff is internationally known for her collaborative sound installations created with George Bures Miller but initially trained as a printmaker. Though a very different working mode, connective threads to her later installations such as the exploration of narrative, intimacy, dreams, and a sense of the theatrical are present in these large-scale screenprints.
Jeannie Thib’s multi-panel artwork, Baudelaire’s Mistress, directly references Edouard Manet’s painting, Woman with a Fan (Jeanne Duval). Thib’s print omits the painting’s central figure and focuses on the dramatic sweep of a lace curtain in its backdrop, the folds of which echo Duval’s seated composition and pose. This monumental print embodies many themes that Thib explored throughout her work, including drawing from art historical material and the suggestion of the body through imagery of draped textiles.
Harold Klunder’s prints in the Main Gallery show the physicality of lithography at a large scale. His energetic prints operate between figuration and abstraction and often act as self-portraits, such as in the towering work Water Figure (Self Portrait), composed from three massive lithograph stones.
In the Project Space, smaller lithographs and etchings by Klunder exemplify how his expressive, painterly vocabulary is present even at the most modest of scales. Alongside this, a series of intimate lithographs by Graham Coughtry use sparingly gestural marks to create dynamic abstractions of nude figures.