New York, NY | Artist Talk: Deborah Druick in Conversation with Sasha Phyars Burgess

About the exhibition:

BODIES brings together three intergenerational artists united by their strong interest in pattern, design, figuration, and the human body. Collectively, their work is informed by the human experience and the politics around the representation of the human form, as well as by popular culture.

The work of Ray Yoshida (1930-2009), Christina Ramberg (1946-1995), and Deborah Druick (b. 1951) strays from the overarching influence of Abstract Expressionism that especially dominated Yoshida and Ramberg’s generations. Their commitment to formal principles instead lends itself to careful studies of the body that crop it or focus on its minute details. Their mutual interest in the human body is more physiological than illustrative, a commitment that is further demonstrated by their works’ compositional strength which reflects more than just raw emotion.

The influence of popular culture in the form of cartoons and comic books manifests in defined lines and weighty figures for whom a world beyond the canvas does not exist. Like the panels of a comic book, these spaces are contained, unlike the Abstract Expressionist tendency to imply the brushstroke’s extension well beyond the space of the canvas.

All three artists bring their investigations into so-called low art to a high plane that questions our perceptions of the world around us. They do not shy from depicting “private” body parts or “negative” human conditions, like isolation. They employ style for study’s sake, deeply informed by the very principles of art as observation and as a translation of what it means to be human.