Fantasy Underfoot - The 47th Biennial Exhibition

Fantasy Underfoot: The 47th Corcoran Biennial features thirteen artists whose work of the past two years mines the legacy of both conceptual art and the "new media" of the 1960s. These artists were selected on the basis of the impact of their work and the ways they resolve complex theoretical issues using approaches that are readily accessible. Their videos, films, photography, paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, and digital works all employ familiar or easily understood forms designed to quickly seduce and engage the viewer. Promoting a sense of immediacy and comprehensibility, the exhibition also offers an intellectual exercise that operates on a number of levels.

This Biennial takes stock of a dominant trend in recent art that exploits familiar or appealing forms, many of them derived from the mass media, for overtly conceptual ends. Fantasy Underfoot suggests that deeper realms of consciousness are close at hand, that fantasy, fantastical revelation, and the abstract world of ideas are concrete matters in the realm of art.