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NOW at the Corcoran: Past Exhibitions

NOW at the Corcoran

Past Exhibitions

 

Enoc Perez: Utopia
November 10, 2012–February 10, 2013

Enoc Perez’s lushly figured paintings of modernist buildings at once exploit and question the seductions of architecture as well as painting itself.  The exhibition presents two new bodies of work, one focusing on the Marina Towers in Chicago and the other a commissioned painting of the Watergate in Washington, D.C.  These architectural portraits evoke modernism’s futurist aspirations as well as the sadness of an always-impossible ideal.  Originally from Puerto Rico, Perez lives and works in New York.  This is his first exhibition in Washington.

Charlotte Dumas: Anima
July 14–October 28, 2012

Charlotte Dumas travels the world making evocative, formal photographic portraits of animals. She typically works in series, portraying animals characterized by their utility, social function, or the way they relate to people. A rising international contemporary artist, Dumas recently received widespread acclaim for her photographs of the surviving search and recovery dogs of 9/11. Anima, her first one-person museum exhibition in the United States, features a newly commissioned series of portraits centered on the majestic burial horses of Arlington National Cemetery. These Army horses, which belong to the Old Guard—the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment—carry soldiers to their final resting place in traditional military funerals. The exhibition also includes three earlier bodies of work that explore the inner lives of animals: gray wolves living in nature preserves; racehorses tethered in their stables; and stray dogs surviving on the streets of Palermo. Drawing inspiration from classical portrait painting of the Dutch 17th-century Golden Age, Dumas uses her camera to provoke a relationship between her subjects and the viewer, engendering a greater consciousness of how we experience animals in our everyday lives.



Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro: Are We There Yet?
December 3, 2011–March 11, 2012

For their first exhibition in the United States, Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro will explore the aspiration of space travel with the necessity of food consumption. Working with statistics related to food, beverages, and household goods, the artistic duo propose to physically illustrate what an astronaut—consuming only the goods of the “everyman”—would require on a journey to Mars. At the conclusion of the exhibition, the contents of the display will be given away, creating an event to highlight existing cycles of production, consumption, and distribution.

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Chris Martin: Painting Big
June 18–October 23, 2011

Painting Big presents the work of abstract painter Chris Martin in the form of a three-part exhibition. One portion brings together large-scale works from the past nine years; another is a dense assemblage of small paintings in the Rotunda on view through August 28; the third presents a new body of work: a site-specific installation of monumental paintings in the museum’s central atrium. Martin’s paintings are tactile and stitched-together, incorporating found objects and collage into their abstract geometries and rhythmic patterns. His works relate to the physical world as much as to his own internal landscape of memories and experiences, which draw from music, literature, and the human relationship to the natural world. Originally from Washington, D.C., this will mark Chris Martin’s first exhibition in the city and his first one-artist museum exhibition.

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Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud
September 11, 2010 – January 23, 2011

NOW at the Corcoran’s inaugural exhibition presents new work by Spencer Finch. Finch’s sculptural installations, photographs, and drawings seek to capture the elusive space between perception and the outside world, probing the intersections of science, nature, and memory. Using industrial materials to recreate individual experiences or particular sensations such as candlelight or the wind off of Walden Pond, he also draws from historical accounts by poets and philosophers to explore the persistence of human curiosity. Finch’s works play with light, color, and time to remind his viewers that looking is never as simple as it looks.

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