Alice Neel. Randall in Extremis, 1960. Oil on canvas, 36 x 28 in. © Estate of Alice Neel

The Frist Center is especially pleased to announce the upcoming opening of Paint Made Flesh. This exhibition, organized by Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala, presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the carnal properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin.

As a revisionist study of post-World War II art, Paint Made Flesh offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability. The exhibition includes works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Eric Fischl, Georg Baselitz, Jenny Saville, Wangechi Mutu, John Currin, Cecily Brown, Daniel Richter, and others.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a full-color illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by Vanderbilt University Press, with essays by Mark Scala and Susan H. Edwards, Ph.D., executive director and CEO of the Frist Center, as well as by noted scholars Emily Braun, Ph.D., professor of art history at Hunter College (New York, N.Y.) and Richard Shiff, Ph.D., professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Paint Made Flesh will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., June 20nSept. 13, 2009; and to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y. Oct. 24, 2009nJan. 3, 2010.

Paint Made Flesh Symposium Offered

The Frist Center will host a major symposium January 23n24, 2009, in conjunction with Paint Made Flesh.

The symposium will offer compelling conversation about the role of figure painting as it has defined psychological and socio-historical conditions in Europe and the United States since World War II.

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION – John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, Museum of Modern Art

SPEAKERS

Michael Bess, chancellor’s professor of history, Vanderbilt University

Emily Braun, distinguished professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University New York

Susan H. Edwards, executive director and CEO, Frist Center

Eric Fischl, artist

Mark Scala, chief curator, Frist Center

Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in art history and director, Center for the Study of Modernism, University of Texas-Austin

Cost to attend: $30 students/faculty; $35 members; $50 non-members

See a detailed schedule of the symposium. To register, call 615.744.3247 or complete and send in the symposium registration form.