Somatic Markings
Past exhibition
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Somatic Markings features seven international artists that employ the nude figure to grapple with issues of contemporary corporeal politics. Incorporating feminist, queer, and postcolonial methodologies that are constitutive of the artists’ personal histories, these works disassemble notions of the traditional nude, transforming the figure into a medium for nuanced discussions that develop on and beyond issues of identity or the reclamation of the gaze. Rendered in vivid hues that blur the line between figuration and abstraction, the exhibited works respond formally with a rejection of the binaries that underscore the logical fallacies of many forms of oppression. On view at 297 Tenth Avenue from November 3 through December 23, the exhibition includes work by Shadi Al-Atallah, Mira Dancy, Miranda Forrester, Elizabeth Glaessner, Anya Kielar, Katherina Olschbaur, and Mark Yang.
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The exhibition draws on the text The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics by Victoria Pitts-Taylor. The author’s theory of complex embodiment sees “the body and its representations as mutually transformative. Social representations obviously affect the experience of the body […] but the body possesses the ability to determine its social representations as well.” The exhibition explores such evolving paradigms regarding our relationship to our undeniable physicality, developing on feminist and queer theories that have focused on the uses of the nude in social terms. The paintings included in Somatic Markings rework various art historical conventions—including classical examples of idealized physicality, fauvist color palettes, prehistoric fetishistic talismans, and cubist disassembly—with each artist’s personal mythology to present a neoteric vision of the future.
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Together, the works typify each artist’s role as a mirror or medium through which a complex and influential triangulation of mind, body, and society can be expressed. The painters included in the exhibition enact profound explorations of the brain-body connection that call on their personal experiences in multiple ways, touching on experiences of illness, gender, and sexuality. More broadly, unpacking the manner in which physical presentation affects our experience in society, the works combine analysis of the body politic with that of the role of the individual body in an increasingly nationalistic political landscape.
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Through painting, the body enacts a cathartic mechanism for psychological healing that occurs outside of binaries. Emphasizing themes of embodiment, performativity, transformation, agency, and freedom, Somatic Markings acts as a forum for contemporary discourse and proposes that the inherently relational experience of our bodies can become analogous to the act of making itself—painting as an embodied performance.
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Works
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Explore
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Alma Allen
May 16 – June 22, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New YorkThe gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970) brings together new freestanding sculpture and wall reliefs. This body of work evolves various compositional and material directions explored in Allen’s recent site-specific solo exhibition Nunca Solo at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City, demonstrating the artist’s ongoing experimentation into the ability of matter to embody contemplations on free will, consciousness, and the nature of time. -
NARES TRACES
May 16 – June 22, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkThe fifteenth solo exhibition at the gallery of work by multidisciplinary artist Jamie Nares (b. 1953) examines over 100 works on paper in a variety of media—namely oil, ink, and enamel—made after refocusing her artistic attention from film to painting in the early 1980s. Coolly perceptive, Nares’ works on paper share the same conceptual focus on movement, rhythm, and measurements of time that has driven the artist’s various bodies of work over the last fifty years. This exhibition points to paper as an essential instrument in Nares’ ongoing exploration of these themes.
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