New and relatively new. Under Michael Darling, the modern and contemporary galleries at the Seattle Art Museum are in frequent motion. New at SAM is an occasional series that will highlight what slips into the museum’s galleries without a lot of fanfare.
Virginia and Bagley Wright own Living Room, Scene 2 (below) from his 2003 Krefeld Project, plus a set of the final photos of the series, promised gifts.
Never has the divide between classically cool modernist architecture and the people who inhabit it been as decisively painted as in this series, which grew out the Museum Haus Esters‘ invitation to Fischl to create paintings using the museum as backdrop.
Designed in 1928 by Mies van der Rohe, the museum was once a residence, and Fischl decided to treat it as one again. He hired two actors, shot thousands of photos, manipulated the most promising and painted 12 canvases inspired by the results.
Living Room, Scene 2 is all about psychic, social, sexual, aesthetic and financial power. The male figure owns all he surveys, including woman curled in a submissive pose on a chair, the sleek interior and the art it houses.
Behind him is the man’s Gerhard Richter (the artist’s wife descending a staircase), his Warhol and Bruce Nauman. Some have speculated that these artists must be important to Fischl, which is why he included their representations, as homage.
Surely not. Fischl is a society painter in the tradition of John Singer Sargent and more recently (and to a lesser extent) Lucian Freud. His work has nothing to do with Richter, Warhol and/or Nauman. Those three are what he isn’t, dominant. By featuring them, he’s signaling that his fictional titan of industry owns the best, takes it for granted and doesn’t bother to look at it.
Before the economic meltdown, while free market traders were still riding high, Fischl painted the character of Capitalism’s favorite sons. His painting reveals the pleasure he took in it. Rest of the series here.
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