Hey Beautiful! at Amos Eno Gallery
February 1 - February 25, 2011Featuring: Vika Adutova, Jennie Booth, Annie Kyle, Midori Okuyama, Zoé Williams, Siang-Jen Yang
Beauty. There is perhaps no concept more closely associated with art in the popular imagination. But beauty has been having a rough time lately. Successive avant-garde movements and each corresponding "anti-art" gesture have deposed the belle of the ball. The art world did not drive out beauty directly; rather it got rid of her partner, the ugly. Decaying ruins became Romantic; banal fixtures became Culture; Film du Soleil made the burned out wasteland a magical counter-utopia. By aestheticizing and canonizing the Gothic, the Industrial, the Abject, and the Uncanny, the art world turned "ugly" into "interesting". And where did that leave beauty? No longer the opposite of ugly, beauty became the opposite of relevant. Never one to dance alone, beauty sat on the sidelines. Someone once offered her a Sublime corsage; it lifted her spirit, but provided no gladness to the senses.
This exhibition inquires into the role of beauty in art now. Can beauty retake the aspirational zenith of art? Or does it function as cultural décor and marketable commodity? Is art today merely designed or aesthetically purposive? These works play with, against, and for beauty, asking us to consider whether beauty can be reformed. Even celebrated. Is beauty back?
Amos Eno Gallery
111 Front Street, Suite 202
Brooklyn, New York 11201