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Bodies of Work

June 17, 2017 – February 18, 2019
East Building, Upper Level

A man and a woman with black skin stand in a sage and olive-green boat that comes toward us on a wavy, dripping band of cobalt blue that spans the lower edge of this loosely hanging, square canvas. The word “WANDERER” is written in white capital letters along the bow of the boat. Closer to us, in the boat, a woman is seen from the hips up. An oval, cloud-like form covers her torso, shoulders, and the area behind her head. It is white with rose-pink swirls, and has a few black lines creating scallops around the edge. A black shape at her waist, just over a cobalt-blue skirt, could indicate that at least one arm is bent behind her back. The penis, thighs, and knees of a man are seen between the boat and the triangular, pale lilac-purple sail. The sail is painted with long, curling strokes of violet purple up its center. A long, white pennant with two gold stars flutters from the boat’s burgundy-red mast, which has a crosspiece just below the pennant. The water is painted with strokes of royal blue, which partially drip over a white skull at the lower center. The boat is set against a background layered in washes of white, shell pink, and baby blue, with swirls and thin strokes of brick red scattered across it. A yellow sun outlined in deeper gold peeks above the horizon in the lower left, and is repeated with more orbs that together make an arc that curves to the upper right corner. A few geometric line drawings hover next to the woman, on our left, such as a compass-like cross with a crosshatched oval at each end. A black number "1" floats in the lower left, above the water, and a black number "7" floats near the upper left. Two more black sevens float near the upper right, next to another heart-shaped line drawing. The background transitions from the pale washes to darker orbs of pink and blue, that overlap a band of black that nearly spans the top edge. In that upper zone, a black, gold, and red compass floats near the top of the mast, to our left. A sheet with anatomical illustrations hangs from the left arm of the mast. The drawings show cell clusters and human fetuses, some circled in red. A second drawing of a house circled in lilac purple hangs on the right arm, next to a third drawing of concentric circles.

Kerry James Marshall, Voyager, 1992, acrylic and collage on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.79.52

The phrase body of work refers to the production of a single artist, writer, or composer. So does corpus (Latin for body) and oeuvre (French for work). Such terms become literal through the artist’s depiction of the body itself. This permanent collection installation focuses on works of art made over the past 50 years that reimagine the human form as a site of fantasy, fear, and travail. As the critic Britt Julious reminds us, “Art is as much about labor as it is about interpretation.”

Painted mostly with areas of flat, vibrant color, eight people or animals, or possibly hybrids, span and fill this horizontal, abstracted composition. The people and creatures’ features are simplified and stylized into bold forms. To our left, a winged woman holds out her arms and grips an uprooted tree, which creates a diagonal up the center of the composition. The woman has fire engine-red hair and grayish-green shadows on her pale, peach face. Her royal-blue dress has a low, sweetheart neckline and her breasts are outlined in a thick black line. The tree she holds has three roots and one branch, which holds a round disk covered in colorful dots, like a nonpareil candy. In front of her, a lemon-yellow person overlaps or becomes a pink, lizard-like creature. The yellow being has red eyes and nostrils, a black cap or hair, and black outlines around the eyes and nose. The creature at the back end has wide red lips, a red-rimmed, black eye, the suggestion of black hair, and red, presumably blood, trickling out of its parted mouth. Closer to us and seen from the waist up, a person with red eyes and lips, brown skin, black hair, and a pink bodice stands with arms overhead, as if holding opposite elbows. The eyes and mouth make wide-open Os. On the right half of the picture, a scarlet-red person with its lower jaw drooping open sits on a white form like a ghost, and plunges one hand, wrist-deep, into the ghost-like form’s mouth. The white creature has red eyes, blue hair, and lies on its back. A brown creature with sharp teeth and a red tongue and eyes reaches up from the bottom edge of the canvas. One clawed hand clutches the white figure’s face over the left ear and the other nails or talons snag onto the red creature’s knee. The final creature has red lips, nose, eyes, hands, and yellow teeth, and it lurks in the background above and behind the red and white pair. Resembling an octopus, it has two arms and three legs, and is mottled with violet purple and carnation pink. The areas around and behind all the figures are expanses of grass green, bubblegum pink, butter yellow, blue, dark gray, or white to suggest a landscape.

Bob Thompson, Tree, 1962, oil on canvas, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.3

Taken together, these paintings and sculptures suggest just how much contemporary artists continue to grapple with the many different ways that the body has figured in the history of art and broader historical narratives. Bob Thompson’s majestic Tree fuses two consecutive plates (Volaverunt and Quien lo creyera!) from Los Caprichos (1797–1799), Goya’s scathing print portfolio, and morphs the human figures into violent creatures. In Kerry James Marshall’s Voyager, the artist pictured two black figures in a small boat with the name Wanderer, referring to the last documented slave ship to land in the United States. As Marshall has said, Voyager “embodies those concepts of transformation, of birth and rebirth,” situating the body in a process of continual change.

A woman sitting on a floor with her body angled to our left nearly fills this stylized, vertical painting. Her skin is light tan in some areas, as around her eyes, chest, one hand, and the leg and foot we can see, while what seems like brown paint creeps up her neck to drip upward around her cheeks and onto her forehead. The brown also drips down onto her cleavage, along one arm toward her wrist, and down the shin of her leg. Her right hand, on our left, is entirely brown. She holds her long hair up over her head with her brown hand in front of her face, looking at it with blue eyes and touching it with the other hand. Her hair is blond with dark roots at her scalp, created with long, parallel brushstrokes. Her long nails and curling lips are scarlet red. She wears an emerald-green robe trimmed with white fur and a long strand of pearls that drape over her left arm, closer to us. She sits on a cushion decorated with brown koi fish and stylized blue waves of water, but the exact arrangement of her legs is unclear. A stack of patterned pillows is piled behind her to our left, and comes up to her shoulder. Red circular forms behind her head are painted slate blue with deep brown shadows and red highlights. The words “BACK AND FORTH” are repeated in rows, written in capital yellow letters edged with red, filling the background. Two Japanese characters are painted in red near the lower right corner.
Bodies of Work

Rozeal. (formerly known as iona rozeal brown), afro.died, T., 2011, acrylic, pen, ink, marker, and graphite on birch plywood panel, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.243
Painted mostly with areas of flat, vibrant color, eight people or animals, or possibly hybrids, span and fill this horizontal, abstracted composition. The people and creatures’ features are simplified and stylized into bold forms. To our left, a winged woman holds out her arms and grips an uprooted tree, which creates a diagonal up the center of the composition. The woman has fire engine-red hair and grayish-green shadows on her pale, peach face. Her royal-blue dress has a low, sweetheart neckline and her breasts are outlined in a thick black line. The tree she holds has three roots and one branch, which holds a round disk covered in colorful dots, like a nonpareil candy. In front of her, a lemon-yellow person overlaps or becomes a pink, lizard-like creature. The yellow being has red eyes and nostrils, a black cap or hair, and black outlines around the eyes and nose. The creature at the back end has wide red lips, a red-rimmed, black eye, the suggestion of black hair, and red, presumably blood, trickling out of its parted mouth. Closer to us and seen from the waist up, a person with red eyes and lips, brown skin, black hair, and a pink bodice stands with arms overhead, as if holding opposite elbows. The eyes and mouth make wide-open Os. On the right half of the picture, a scarlet-red person with its lower jaw drooping open sits on a white form like a ghost, and plunges one hand, wrist-deep, into the ghost-like form’s mouth. The white creature has red eyes, blue hair, and lies on its back. A brown creature with sharp teeth and a red tongue and eyes reaches up from the bottom edge of the canvas. One clawed hand clutches the white figure’s face over the left ear and the other nails or talons snag onto the red creature’s knee. The final creature has red lips, nose, eyes, hands, and yellow teeth, and it lurks in the background above and behind the red and white pair. Resembling an octopus, it has two arms and three legs, and is mottled with violet purple and carnation pink. The areas around and behind all the figures are expanses of grass green, bubblegum pink, butter yellow, blue, dark gray, or white to suggest a landscape.
Bodies of Work

Bob Thompson, Tree, 1962, oil on canvas, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.3
A headless mannequin of a person dressed in a colorful, patterned gown balances on a globe of the Earth in this free-standing sculpture. The person has medium-brown skin and, in this photograph, her body faces our right in profile. She balances on one foot, which is planted near the Arctic Circle, and her other foot is raised behind her, as if running. Her arms are lifted, palms facing outward. The bodice of her dress is mustard yellow with a swirling green and blue pattern running down the sleeve we can see. The cuffs and hem are trimmed with ruffles striped in navy blue, yellow, and white, some with thin, horizonal blue lines. The same fabric is gathered in horizontal pleats down the front of the dress. The rest of the skirt is a mix of maroon-red fabric decorated with geometric patterns in pumpkin orange, teal green, golden yellow, and ginger brown. The fabric is gathered up like a bustle at the girl’s lower back. Her ankle boots are made from the fabric patterned in blue, yellow, white, and maroon. Much of the globe is covered in areas of honey yellow and marigold orange. A few areas have darker red zones, including a rust-red band curving from Western to Southern Africa. Smaller, even darker zones are nested over the southern part of that continent. A zone of crimson red covers much of Iran and Afghanistan, and reaches into Russia and the surrounding areas, at the top of the globe. The sculpture sits on a hardwood floor and is shown against a white wall.
Bodies of Work

Yinka Shonibare, Girl on Globe 2, 2011, fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton, and globe, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, by exchange: William A. Clark Collection), 2015.19.3962
This rectangular, tangerine-orange panel has rounded corners and a black dot at the center. It hangs on a dove gray wall and is about three times as tall as it is wide. The surface appears streaked with golden yellow where light reflects off some areas of the wax, especially in the top half.
Bodies of Work

Lynda Benglis, 1st Wax Work, 1966, purified pigmented beeswax, dammar resin, and powdered aniline dye on Masonite, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, 2016.11.4
Bodies of Work

Lynda Benglis, Untitled, 1971, purified pigmented beeswax, dammar resin, and gesso on particle board, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, 1991.241.31
Three casts of human hands and forearms hang from the top edge of the right half of this horizontal abstract painting, which is divided vertically in two equal parts. The rectangular field to the left is mottled with steel and charcoal gray streaked with white and amethyst purple. The panel to the right is divided again so the top half is slightly larger than the bottom half. The bottom portion is painted with a pattern to resemble abstracted wood grain in nickel and slate gray. A stylized white cloth, perhaps a handkerchief, is painted to look as if hanging from a nail hammered into the wood paneling, to our left. The top portion seems to be layered with paintings and prints below and beneath the three arms. The three-dimensional arms hang from looped metal wires on metal hooks spaced along the top edge, coming about a quarter of the way down the overall composition. The peach-colored arms and hands are painted all over with irregular gray patches, creating a camouflage effect. They hang down so the open palms are flat against the canvas, the thumbs extended to our left. The top of the arm to our left is painted cherry red, the middle is painted canary yellow, and the right arm royal blue. The paint drips down the arms and splatters on the hands and on the faux wood panel below. Behind the hands, it appears that one of the artist’s prints hangs from two nails on the canvas, but this is also part of the painting. The illusionistic print has three horizontal bands of pine green, pumpkin orange, and violet purple crisscrossed with black lines. Seeming to hang behind it and under the right-most arm is a sheet of music overlapping another piece of paper printed with the letters “OHN C” and “THE PERILOUS.” Below, and filling the space between the illusionistic print and the wood panel, is a rectangular field of abstract gray and black swirling forms. The entire canvas is surrounded by a thin, amber-colored wood frame. A narrow wooden slat is attached with a hinge on the inner surface of the frame at the bottom right corner, so the slat runs up along and rests against the canvas near the rightmost edge of the frame. The artist signed the work with stenciled letters in pale gray in the lower right corner: “J. JOHNS ‘8.”
Bodies of Work

Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1982, encaustic and silkscreen on canvas with objects, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, 1995.79.1
A man and a woman with black skin stand in a sage and olive-green boat that comes toward us on a wavy, dripping band of cobalt blue that spans the lower edge of this loosely hanging, square canvas. The word “WANDERER” is written in white capital letters along the bow of the boat. Closer to us, in the boat, a woman is seen from the hips up. An oval, cloud-like form covers her torso, shoulders, and the area behind her head. It is white with rose-pink swirls, and has a few black lines creating scallops around the edge. A black shape at her waist, just over a cobalt-blue skirt, could indicate that at least one arm is bent behind her back. The penis, thighs, and knees of a man are seen between the boat and the triangular, pale lilac-purple sail. The sail is painted with long, curling strokes of violet purple up its center. A long, white pennant with two gold stars flutters from the boat’s burgundy-red mast, which has a crosspiece just below the pennant. The water is painted with strokes of royal blue, which partially drip over a white skull at the lower center. The boat is set against a background layered in washes of white, shell pink, and baby blue, with swirls and thin strokes of brick red scattered across it. A yellow sun outlined in deeper gold peeks above the horizon in the lower left, and is repeated with more orbs that together make an arc that curves to the upper right corner. A few geometric line drawings hover next to the woman, on our left, such as a compass-like cross with a crosshatched oval at each end. A black number
Bodies of Work

Kerry James Marshall, Voyager, 1992, acrylic and collage on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.79.52
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #1, chair, 1984, printed 1991, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2011.144.7
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #11, boot, 1984, printed 1993, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2006.159.5
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #12, door, 1984, printed 1993, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2006.159.6
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair, 1984, printed 1993, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2006.159.7
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #2, stool, 1984, printed 1991, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2011.144.8
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #3, shoe, 1984, printed 1991, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2011.144.9
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #4, cloth, 1985, printed 1991, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2011.144.10
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #14, megaphone, 1986, printed 1993, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2006.159.8
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #6, seed suit, 1987, printed 1991, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2011.144.11
Bodies of Work

Ann Hamilton, body object series #16, flour, 1993, gelatin silver print, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, 2006.159.10
A man’s face printed in hot pink and banana yellow against a black background is repeated four times in this square silkscreen painting. The portraits are arranged in a grid of two by two. The man has a mop of spiky, unruly hair, heavy black brows, and a wide nose. His lips are set in a line over a rounded chin. Each one shows the man with a slightly different expression, some with his chin pulled back and others are straight on, but all look steadily at us with black eyes. The pink and yellow faces overlap but are out of alignment in each portrait. Pink and yellow edges surround each black square.
Bodies of Work

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1986, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2000.28.1
Shown from the shoulders up against a white background, an elderly woman gazing at us fills this black and white vertical portrait painting. The portrait is created with tones of light and silvery gray with darker gray in the shadows. Short, wavy, flyaway hair stands off the top and sides of her head, and she looks at us with half-closed, small eyes under arched brows. Her wide mouth is closed, and the corners are pulled back in a slight smile. Deep wrinkles run down from the corners of her mouth to her drooping jowls. There is a deep, round hollow, shaded black, at the base of her neck, which is surrounded by a starburst of fine wrinkles. She wears a light gray, V-neck shirt with white stripes and stylized flowers. The overall impression is that this portrait is painted with delicate tones of gray, but closer inspection reveals that it was made with inked fingerprints. The whorls of fingers in black ink, pressed lightly or layered against the canvas, are visible.
Bodies of Work

Chuck Close, Fanny/Fingerpainting, 1985, oil on canvas, Gift of Lila Acheson Wallace, 1987.2.1
A man with dark brown skin, a black afro, mustache, and goatee, and wearing a cardinal-red coat over a black suit, is shown three times in this vertical portrait painting. The version at the center stands with his back to us and those to each side face the left and right edges of the canvas, respectively. They stand close enough for their shoulders to touch, and all three views of the man float against a paper-white background. The man has a deep-set eyes under black brows and high cheekbones. His thin mustache frames full lips, which are closed in all three views, and a line of black hair grows down his pointed chin. He wears a jet-black suit over a bright-white turtleneck shirt, and honey-brown and ivory-white wingtip dress shoes. The collar of his shin-length, red coat is popped up, and the belt hangs loose. In the version to our left, he faces that direction in profile with his eyes closed as he pulls the coat back to tuck his left hand, closer to us, into the pocket of his suit jacket. At the center of the canvas, the man turns his face to our left so we see the side of his cheekbone, the tip of his nose, and his eyelashes outlined against the white background. In the view to our right, his body faces that direction with the hand closer to us tucked into the coat pocket. He turns his head to look toward or at us with shadowed eyes. The artist signed and dated the painting in the upper right corner: “B. Hendricks 72.”
Bodies of Work

Barkley L. Hendricks, Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, 1972, oil and acrylic on canvas, William C. Whitney Foundation, 1973.19.1
Creating two lines that move away from us, a row of seven busts of a woman’s head and neck made from brown chocolate face a row seven busts showing the same woman made from white soap, each on an identical white, columnar pedestal. In this photograph, they are placed in a long room with cream-white walls, tan stone molding, and a dark gray marble floor leading to an open doorway at the far end of the room, across from us. Each bust shows a woman with a small button nose, pursed lips, and closed eyes. Her hair is pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. Each bust ends just below the shoulder line and is held on a base that flares out like a chess piece to act as a foot. Each sits on a columnar pedestal that comes about a third of the way up the height of the tall doorway. Though the faces look similar or identical at first glance, closer inspection shows that some are worn at different areas, like the chin, forehead, nose, cheeks, or bun. One of the soap busts, at the far end, is missing the entire crown of the head and the profiles of two more soap busts and one chocolate bust are worn down so much it appears the face is missing. The surface of some of the chocolate busts looks almost frosted where the light hits it. The ivory color of the soap busts are more consistent.
Bodies of Work

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, complete set of fourteen busts: seven in chocolate and seven in soap on fourteen pedestals, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2016.49.1
560 panels, each painted a unique, flat color, are hung in a grid to create an abstract work of art. The grid has ten horizontal rows of fifty-six panels. The surface of each panel is covered from edge to edge with a single color. The colors range from mahogany to peach, almond white to dark brown. Some panels are smoothly painted while brushwork is visible on others.
Bodies of Work

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991-present, oil and wax on lauan plywood, birch plywood, and plywood, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2009.39.1.1-560
We look down onto a tidy stack of hundreds of sheets of white paper, which sits on a gray, speckled floor in this photograph. The top sheet is printed with a small, dove-gray rectangle at the center. A corner of the stack angles toward us, with the short side of the sheets to our left and the long side to our right.
Bodies of Work

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Ross in L.A.), 1991, print on paper, endless copies, Gift of the Collectors Committee and Emily and Mitchell Rales, 2017.51.1
Bodies of Work

Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait (VIII), 1996, silkscreen ink on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.5301
Bodies of Work

Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait (X), 1996, silkscreen ink on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.217
The words “I AM A MAN” are painted in all capital, bold black letters against a white ground in this vertical painting. The words are spaced so they take up most of the composition, with “I AM” on the top line, “A” at the center of the composition, and “A MAN” at the bottom. “AM” is underlined. The white paint is thickly applied and brushstrokes, drips, and cracks are visible on the surface. A sliver of raw, off-white canvas is visible at the top right corner.
Bodies of Work

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am a Man), 1988, oil and enamel on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of the Artist, 2012.109.1
Bodies of Work

Ross Bleckner, Birds Falling, 1994-1995, oil on canvas, Gift of Anthony T. Podesta, Washington, DC, 1998.106.1
Bodies of Work

Kiki Smith, Seer (Alice II), 2005, cast iron, Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, 2014.142.1
Bodies of Work

Arlene Shechet, Twin Rockers, 2007, ceramic, steel, acrylic, and plywood, Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, 2016.9.3

Artist Focus: Yinka Shonibare

A headless mannequin of a person dressed in a colorful, patterned gown balances on a globe of the Earth in this free-standing sculpture. The person has medium-brown skin and, in this photograph, her body faces our right in profile. She balances on one foot, which is planted near the Arctic Circle, and her other foot is raised behind her, as if running. Her arms are lifted, palms facing outward. The bodice of her dress is mustard yellow with a swirling green and blue pattern running down the sleeve we can see. The cuffs and hem are trimmed with ruffles striped in navy blue, yellow, and white, some with thin, horizonal blue lines. The same fabric is gathered in horizontal pleats down the front of the dress. The rest of the skirt is a mix of maroon-red fabric decorated with geometric patterns in pumpkin orange, teal green, golden yellow, and ginger brown. The fabric is gathered up like a bustle at the girl’s lower back. Her ankle boots are made from the fabric patterned in blue, yellow, white, and maroon. Much of the globe is covered in areas of honey yellow and marigold orange. A few areas have darker red zones, including a rust-red band curving from Western to Southern Africa. Smaller, even darker zones are nested over the southern part of that continent. A zone of crimson red covers much of Iran and Afghanistan, and reaches into Russia and the surrounding areas, at the top of the globe. The sculpture sits on a hardwood floor and is shown against a white wall.

Yinka Shonibare, Girl on Globe 2, 2011, fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton, and globe, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, by exchange: William A. Clark Collection), 2015.19.3962

In Girl on Globe 2, British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare employs Dutch wax-printed cotton to make a mannequin’s Victorian dress. This fabric—made in the Netherlands, inspired by Indonesian batiks, and marketed to African buyers—packs in references to colonialism and globalization. The globe itself bears a heat map that refers to climate change, while the headless figure is meant to suggest the beheadings of the French Revolution as well as the erasure of identity. In the absence of a head, we focus on the body: that nexus of pain, pleasure, and politics of great interest to artists since the 1960s. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, “Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.”

Portraiture

Creating two lines that move away from us, a row of seven busts of a woman’s head and neck made from brown chocolate face a row seven busts showing the same woman made from white soap, each on an identical white, columnar pedestal. In this photograph, they are placed in a long room with cream-white walls, tan stone molding, and a dark gray marble floor leading to an open doorway at the far end of the room, across from us. Each bust shows a woman with a small button nose, pursed lips, and closed eyes. Her hair is pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. Each bust ends just below the shoulder line and is held on a base that flares out like a chess piece to act as a foot. Each sits on a columnar pedestal that comes about a third of the way up the height of the tall doorway. Though the faces look similar or identical at first glance, closer inspection shows that some are worn at different areas, like the chin, forehead, nose, cheeks, or bun. One of the soap busts, at the far end, is missing the entire crown of the head and the profiles of two more soap busts and one chocolate bust are worn down so much it appears the face is missing. The surface of some of the chocolate busts looks almost frosted where the light hits it. The ivory color of the soap busts are more consistent.

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, complete set of fourteen busts: seven in chocolate and seven in soap on fourteen pedestals, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2016.49.1

In the last half-century, in particular, artists have resisted any singular approach to depicting the human body. Underscoring this point, Glenn Ligon, Barkley Hendricks, and Andy Warhol have made portraits of themselves and others using double, triple, and even quadruple images. Janine Antoni cast 14 self-portrait busts, each identical in shape until the artist undertook the task of licking the seven chocolate busts and bathing with the seven soap busts (hence the playful title, Lick and Lather). The artist’s act of self-erasure differentiates her “self-portrait” from her self, a reflection on the inherently variable nature of cast sculpture as a reproductive medium. 

Alternatively, an artist may present an impression, observation, or conception of someone with little or no detailed description: it need not be mimetic. Portraits may even be abstract or represent only a single part of an individual. 

Artist Focus: Byron Kim

560 panels, each painted a unique, flat color, are hung in a grid to create an abstract work of art. The grid has ten horizontal rows of fifty-six panels. The surface of each panel is covered from edge to edge with a single color. The colors range from mahogany to peach, almond white to dark brown. Some panels are smoothly painted while brushwork is visible on others.

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991-present, oil and wax on lauan plywood, birch plywood, and plywood, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2009.39.1.1-560

Byron Kim’s Synecdoche comprises 560 “skin portraits” of individuals presented alphabetically by first name in a grid. Its title refers to a figure of speech in which the whole represents the part, or the part the whole. As a work of ongoing portraiture (Kim periodically adds new panels), it is literally and figuratively a “body of work.” Kim has said of this project,

What is this whole? Is it a whole so complex that it disintegrates at the very moment of examination? … When we look at this group portrait, some of us may assume certain things about the racial composition of its sitters. As the maker of this work, I know that there are many white people who appear to be black when represented in this severely abstracted manner. It goes without saying that the converse is true. Furthermore, there are so many different colors across any single person’s body and those colors change, sometimes drastically, from part to part and from season to season.

The vast grid of monochromatic rectangles raises questions about the interdependent nature of people’s identifying characteristics. 

Artist Focus: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

We look down onto a tidy stack of hundreds of sheets of white paper, which sits on a gray, speckled floor in this photograph. The top sheet is printed with a small, dove-gray rectangle at the center. A corner of the stack angles toward us, with the short side of the sheets to our left and the long side to our right.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Ross in L.A.), 1991, print on paper, endless copies, Gift of the Collectors Committee and Emily and Mitchell Rales, 2017.51.1

Felix Gonzalez-Torres broke down barriers between art and its audiences by encouraging participation, broadening concepts of originality and authorship, and challenging notions of ownership.

His paper stacks call for the viewer to complete their meaning by removing a piece of paper from the whole. As viewers take sheets, the work slowly disappears; it is renewed as paper is added at the discretion of the owner. Thus, the work becomes a metaphor for cycles of life and death, regeneration and decay. “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.) is dedicated to Gonzalez-Torres’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, the pandemic that would claim Gonzalez-Torres five years later. The temporal nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, always in process and transforming its shape, echoes the ever-changing nature of portraiture itself.

The exhibition is curated by Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, National Gallery of Art.

Installation Information