Lehman Loeb presents bodies Out of Shape

Jackson Reeves Assistant Arts Editor

A shaft of light cuts across the darkness of a lonely room to illuminate a nude woman of unglamorous form and highlight her oddly bulbous thigh in Lisa Yuskavage’s pastel drawing “Shaft.”

Malformed and even deformed figures populate Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection, now on display in the central gallery of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Drawings, pastels, watercolors and sketches by Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Francesco Clemente, Marc Quinn, Laylah Ali, Richard Phillips and Lisa Yuskavage, among others, comprise the exhibit.

The works force the viewer to contemplate the body and whether or not it has a proper form. The exhibit will remain on display for the remainder of the semester with a formal reception and lecture by Ali on Friday, April 25 at 5 p.m.

“There’s no modesty; there’s no sort of shyness or embarrassment about her body,” said Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator Mary-Kay Lombino on “Shaft.” Lombino organized the exhibit under the guidance of the providers of the works of art, Vicki Logan ’68 and Kent Logan.

“She’s very sort of at home in her figure, regardless of the fact that it might not be considered a typical, beautiful figure that you might see in a magazine or a billboard,” Lombino explained.
Lombino studied Renaissance art as an undergraduate at University of Richmond and completed her senior thesis on Donatello’s “David.” Many Italian artists from this period sculpted the likeness of the biblical David, most famously Michelangelo. As a result, the figure of David, in all of its forms, has become a touchstone for idealized beauty. Out of Shape theoretically rebels against the construct of beauty initiated by David.

“The shape of one’s body is up for so much debate, and it’s the subject of everything from political debate to religious discussions to the commodification of the body to feminist theory or queer theory,” Lombino said. “Out of Shape is sort of an umbrella term speaking to a lot of the ways in which the body is a contested terrain.”

Pop artist Warhol drew an image of Superman, a part of his “Myths: Superman” series, with graphite on paper. Warhol’s image of the man of steel reminds the viewer of a time, the 1940s, when a confidence in an idealized shape of masculinity prevailed. Superman nearly replaced David as the image of ideal perfection for a post-war world. As with most of his pop pieces, Warhol mocks this image of idealized beauty, making it absurd.

In another work, two thin figures cloaked in polkadotted, dark indigo with feet protruding from their backs bow before a similarly cloaked, substantially taller figure in Ali’s untitled gouache painting. The unrealistic shapes dodge the categorization of human, figuratively, yet they perform human actions.

Ali’s piece questions the sense of not only proper appearance but also humanity.

Another piece in the exhibit, an untitled drawing by Su-en Wong, presents a nude Asian woman squatting in the midst of a jungle overflowing with bamboo and flora. An expression of submission, enticement and indifference masks her face.

“Each of her works include some reproduction of herself, and often it’s a repeated image of her kind of posing as different types of young female women who maybe use their sexuality and their identity, especially her Asian identity,” Lombino explained.

The female figure in Wong’s work exudes an objectified sexuality. Wong’s unnatural placement of the figure in some unbriddled vision of nature, however, brings about an air of juxtaposition. The viewer can see his or her objectification of the woman as unrealistic. The drawing promotes a playful and coy reading.

The works of Out of Shape illustrate a trend in post-modern art from the 1990s termed figurative conceptualism.
“It’s work that deals with the figure, but it’s not straight figurative artwork,” Lombino explained. “The ways in which or the reasons for which the artists use the figure have much more to do with notions of or concepts dealing with sort of this complex emotionally and psychologically charged idea of the figure.”

The gray tones of Fang Lijun’s large-scale woodcut “1996 No. 19” envelop the viewer as they first enter the exhibit space. Lijun gives five permutations, each of which is nearly identical to the others, of an old Chinese man with his eyes closed within the gray-blue expanse of his work.

Lijun painted “1996” on four vertical paper scrolls. The gaps that the use of different scrolls imposes upon the resultant image underscore the complication of singular identity at stake in Lijun’s work.

Lijun made the work as a contemplation on post-Maoist China. “It’s about the struggle to regain individual identity because everything was for the common good in Maoist China,” Lombino said.

Identity politics dominate the works of Out of Shape, so Lijun’s work logically hangs under the exhibit’s introductory title sign. It’s about destroying the body and attempting to rebuild it, and perhaps in the process one can regain the self.

“It’s just fraught with a lot of emotional turmoil,” Lombino remarked of “1996.” And so is the entire figurative conceptualism gamut in Out of Shape.