Image: Greer Lankton (American, 1958-1996). Rachel (detail), 1986. Papier-mâché, metal plates, wire, acrylic paint, and matte medium. 28 × 21 × 11 in. (71.1 × 53.3 × 27.9 cm). Collection Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams, promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Il corpo umano è sempre al centro dell'attenzione di tutti noi, che sia pornografia o arte, ci affascina e rimane un punto di riferimento nell'immaginifico. Il mezzo più adatto è sempre stata la scultura e il Met di New York, negli spazi del Breuer, quest'anno organizza una bella mostra tutta dedicata a questo tema, con un arco temporale alquanto ampio, dal 1300 a oggi.
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Seven hundred years of sculptural practice—from 14th-century Europe to the global present—will be examined anew in the groundbreaking exhibition Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now). On view at The Met Breuer from March 21 through July 22, 2018, the exhibition will explore expanded narratives of sculpture through works in which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the human body. A major international loan exhibition of approximately 120 works, Like Life will draw on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rich collection of European sculpture and modern and contemporary art, while also featuring a selection of important works from national and international museums and private collections.
The exhibition is supported in part by the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund and The Modern Circle.
Just how perfectly should figurative sculpture resemble the human body? Histories and theories of Western sculpture have typically favored idealized representations, as exemplified by the austere, white marble statuary of the classical tradition. Such works create the fiction of bodies existing outside time, space, and personal or cultural experience. This exhibition, by contrast, will place key sculptures from different eras in conversation with each other in order to examine the age-old problem of realism and the different strategies deployed by artists to blur the distinctions between original and copy, and life and art. Foremost among these is the application of color to imitate skin and flesh. Other tactics include the use of casts taken from real bodies, dressing sculpted figures in clothing, constructing movable limbs and automated bodies, even incorporating human blood, hair, teeth, and bones. Uncanny in their approximation of life, such works have the potential to unsettle and disarm observers, forcing us to consider how we see ourselves and others, and to think deeply about our shared humanity.
Juxtaposing well-known masterpieces with surprising and little-seen works, the exhibition brings together sculptures by artists from Donatello, El Greco, Anna Morandi Manzolini, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas to Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Isa Genzken, Charles Ray, Fred Wilson, Robert Gober, Bharti Kher, Duane Hanson, Jeff Koons and Yinka Shonibare MBE, as well as wax effigies, reliquaries, mannequins and anatomical models. Together these works will highlight the continuing anxieties and pleasures attendant upon the three-dimensional simulation of the human body.
Exhibition Credits
Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) is curated by Luke Syson, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, both at The Met, with Brinda Kumar, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Met, and Emerson Bowyer, Searle Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the assistance of Elyse Nelson, Research Associate, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Met.
It will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by leading scholars and perspectives of contemporary artists.
The catalogue is made possible by the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund.
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